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POSTMODERNISM 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/postmodernismothOObell 


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POSTMODERNISM 


AND OTHER ESSAYS 


BY 


BERNARD IDDINGS BELL, D.D. 


PRESIDENT OF SAINT STEPHEN’S COLLEGE 
Author of ‘‘Right and Wrong after the War’’ and ‘‘The Good News.’’ 


MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
MILWAUKEE, WIS. 
1926 


COPYRIGHT BY 
MORBHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
1926 


TO HALEY FISKE 





CONTENTS 


I. PostMopERNISM PAGE 
1. How Modernism Went Half Way 
and Stopped ; aS Ree 
2. How We Turned to ane for 
the Truth . : 12 
8. How the Scientific Method, ae 
Limitations. 31 
4. How Our Situation is not With- 
out Precedent . 31 
5. How God Became ae sh 
sible. 45 
6. Possible Principles of Bogenor 
ernism . 53 
II. THe Morat Revoir or tHE YOUNGER 
GENERATION . 67 
III. Retigion in CoLuecss . 79 
IV. Tue Cuurcyu anp tHE Youne Man. 95 
V. Vicrortran Eruics anp Rexieion To- 
DAT. 109 
VI. Retigion anp CIVILIZATION 123 





PREFACE 


HE essay which forms the major part of this lit- 

tle volume was written because in the course of 
my lecturing on religion in St. Stephen’s College 
and in other institutions of higher learning I have 
found that it has been necessary to deal with the 
problems involved and that useful books on the 
subject are rare. The point of view taken is com- 
mon enough wherever thinking people meet to- 
gether. It is as yet largely an unexpressed point of 
view, which manifests itself chiefly in resentment 
against the absurdities of “Fundamentalism” and 
the sentimentalities of ‘““Modernism.” At the same 
time it is quite generally recognized that the time 
has come for positive statement about and con- 
structive approach to some such really modern 
religious attitude. 

I made the major thesis of this essay into a 
sermon during the academic year 1924-1925 and 
preached it at Wellesley, Amherst, Williams, Co- 
lumbia, the University of Illinois, St. Stephen’s, 
and my own Alma Mater, the University of Chi- 


x PREFACE 


cago. In all of these places it aroused much inter- 
est, considerable later correspondence, and valuable 
advice, chiefly from scientists who were teachers 
in these institutions. There was a large demand 
that the thesis should be amplified and published. 
I wish particularly to thank my scientific col- 
leagues at St. Stephen’s College for their general 
interest and their many valuable suggestions. I also 
thank the students in the religious survey course 
at that college, who listened patiently to the ideas 
advanced when yet they were somewhat inchoate 
and who, by their most intelligent questioning, 
helped me to bring those ideas into something ap- 
proaching order. 

As for the other essays in the book, it may be 
well to say a word. The one about The Moral Re- 
volt of the Younger Generation was delivered two 
years ago in Baltimore as a paper at a Church Con- 
gress. The article on Religion in Colleges orig- 
inally appeared in The Living Church. This is 
also true of the more or less casual remarks about 
the relationship between Victorian ethics and con- 
temporary religion. The Church and the Young 
Man and Religion and Civilization appeared 
first in The Atlantic Monthly. To the editors of 
both of these papers, for permission to reprint, I 
am. grateful. 

Finally I must acknowledge here the graceful 
hospitality of two Italian hotels, the Grand, at 


PREFACE xi 


Portifino-kulm, and the Villa Sorbelloni, at Bel- 
lagio, where this book was finally prepared for 
publication. 

Bernarp Ippines Batt. 


Annandale-on-Hudson, 
Michaelmas, 1925. 













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I. POSTMODERNISM 





1. HOW MODERNISM WENT HALF 
WAY AND STOPPED 


ROBABLY the chief difficulty of the day, when 
tats comes to discuss religion, is that most of 
us are unable to accept without question the spir- 
itual authority of our immediate predecessors. We 
do not care to sit at the feet of our fathers and 
grandfathers. We have serious doubts as to their 
entire dependability. Nineteenth century Anglo- 
Saxon Christianity was almost wholly the child of 
the Reformation; and that movement seems to 
many of us to exist only historically. We feel that, 
whatever else may be uncertain, it is at least sure 
that we have moved forever away from and beyond 
the sixteenth century. 

The Reformation was based upon two beliefs: 
one, in the infallibility of the Bible; the other, in 
the sufficiency of the individual intellect. Given 
the inerrant book and the individual competent to 
understand the book, there easily followed a sure 
method both of finding God and of ordering the 
moral life. The problem of authority was solved. 


4 POSTMODERNISM 


Upon these sure foundations our fathers could, and 
did, confidently take their stand and set out upon 
spiritual adventure. 

For some little time now we, or those of us at 
least who are informed, have been forced to aban- 
don the first of these beliefs. The Bible can no 
longer be regarded as an inerrant touchstone, the 
wholly infallible gift of the Eternal to struggling 
man. For this reason Protestantism, in any sense 
that would have been acceptable to Luther, or Cal- 
vin, or Wesley, or Moody, is a collapsed, or at least 
a collapsing system. In every so-called Protestant 
communion there are, to be sure, those who wage 
a determined fight for the traditional sanction; 
but it is a losing fight. The fact that many Protes- 
tant bodies continue officially to use the old nomen- 
clature is of no significance save as it serves to con- 
fuse people. Most of the ministers and an increas- 
ing proportion of the lay folk accept conventional 
phrases about scripture inspiration and the abso- 
lute authority of the Bible, but read into the words 
new meanings. They are, commonly, quite willing 
to admit that their real beliefs about the holy 
writings differ largely from those of their prede- 
cessors. 

Whether this free and easy way of using words 
is right or not, at least it is sure that their changed 
convictions are a necessity. Competent modern 
criticism has shown the Bible to be, not a unified 


POSTMODERNISM 5 


and magical book, but rather the great literature 
of a religious people; fascinating and deeply in- 
fused with spirituality but fallible as all human 
writings are fallible; often crudely ignorant of 
scientific facts and principles; in many cases 
redacted for political or priestly purposes; con- 
taining deep truths, seen by great prophets, im- 
bedded frequently in baser settings; a book which, 
after fair and discriminating study, yields much 
true gold; passages of which are among the noblest 
writings of the race; having as its climax the com- 
pelling story of One who claimed to be God and 
was, withal, a simple and brave gentleman. A noble 
library is this Bible, as it comes to us from the 
analysis of modern scholarship; but it is no in- 
fallible record, written by the moving hand of 
God, safely to be appealed to as a sole and wholly 
adequate authority per se on which to build one’s 
life and one’s search for Deity. We can no longer 
say, “God made man out of dust and breathed into 
him a soul. We know it, because the Bible says so. 
When good people die, they live in a great celes- 
tial city. Thus it stands written. Jesus created a 
Church, with a government of bishops, priests, and 
deacons to run it. We are sure of this because these 
officers are mentioned in the record.” Such a simple 
way of proving things will no longer do. We can- 
not even with confidence maintain that Jesus is 
the incarnate Son of God merely because the writ- 


6 POSTMODERNISM 


ings tell us so. If we are to know it, there must be 
other and corroborative evidence. 

All of this has long been known to educated 
people, particularly those whose specialty is the- 
ological and Biblical study. It is with a certain 
dazed amazement that scholarly people have dis- 
covered, from the agitations of the last two or three 
years, that there are still people who seriously 
maintain the old theories about the Scriptures. 
Trained scholars have long supposed that everyone 
knew, what evidently he does not yet know, that 
Biblical criticism won its battle before ever this 
present century saw light. There is not a compe- 
tent Biblical critic today who will seriously main- 
tain that the Bible may properly be regarded in the 
way that Cotton Mather regarded it, or John 
Knox, or Samuel Wilberforce, or Alexander 
Campbell. In most countries even the man in the 
street knows that. Only in America is Biblical 
“fundamentalism,” so-called, undiscredited. The 
Protestant world, despite the late hysterical utter- 
ances of persons who seem to prefer prejudice to 
thought and study, has definitely abandoned its 
primary tenet, and has moved on into what is prop- 
erly called Liberalism and more often, inaccu- 
rately, Modernism. 

This may be a position in which men can and 
will rest. It may be merely a temporary stopping- 
place from which further movement is necessary. 


POSTMODERNISM 7 


Before one considers this latter possibility, how- 
ever, two things need to be recognized. First, be 
Liberalism good or bad, permanent or temporary, 
there can be no going back from it to old-fashioned 
Protestantism. Knowledge and intellectual hon- 
esty prevent that. Second, since it is in these 
nineteen-twenties the prevalent position of the 
churches which once were Protestant, one must 
try to understand what the position really is. 
When one attempts to analyze Liberalism one is 
at once in difficulty because of a common haziness 
of thought and speech by which it is popularly 
confounded with Modernism. Modernism is, prop- 
erly, a way of looking at religion which originated 
with Loisy and Tyrrell, two eminent and deposed 
Roman Catholic priests. Briefly their contention 
was that, while the facts of Christian theology were 
possibly, even probably, not literally true, still one 
ought to express belief in them because they repre- 
sent certain valuable elements in life and have cer- 
tain good effects upon those who assert them. It 
was a way of saying that although things probably 
are not so it would have been helpful if they had 
been so. Of course this is a very crude summary 
of their thoughtful and subtle books, but it fairly 
well represents their position. The Roman pontiff 
deposed these men and put their writings upon the 
Index because he felt—and surely most people will 
agree with him—that it was intellectually impos- 


8 POSTMODERNISM 


sible to assert as facts what one felt merely to be 
symbols. If they were symbols and nothing more, 
it was the part of simple honesty to say so. That, 
speaking carefully, was and still is Modernism. It 
had and has nothing whatever to do with theories 
of Biblical inspiration. ‘The apparently permanent 
confusion of Liberalism with Modernism in the 
popular mind leads to the most absurd mistakes. 
Doctor Manning, the Episcopal Bishop of New 
York, for instance, is frequently referred to in the 
press as a Fundamentalist, because he is opposed 
to Modernism, and the deduction made that he be- 
lieves in the literal infallibility of the Scriptures. 
As a matter of fact he, in common with every 
bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, is as 
far as possible from being a Fundamentalist in his 
attitude toward the Bible. It ought to be clearly 
recognized that there are many people today who 
say the Nicene Creed and mean it and believe it, 
not symbolically, but as a statement of facts, who 
nevertheless know and state that the Bible is what 
we have just said scholars have found it to be. 
There are, to be sure, many catch-phrase people 
who rejoice in having their Liberalism called Mod- 
ernism and who insist that it must be the last word 
in religious wisdom because it is modern, up-to- 
date. It does not really impress thinking men to be 
told that a way of looking at things spiritual must 
be right because it is contemporary. Industrial im- 


POSTMODERNISM 9 


perialism is modern, too, very modern indeed, but 
quite a few of us think it destructive of what in 
life is decently human; Bolshevism is still more 
modern, but surely that does not make it more 
noble and more adequate than the Cecil-Rhodesism 
which it seeks to supplant. Modernity is no eri- 
terion of political truth. It is equally an untrust- 
worthy element in determining religious truth. 
Nothing which purports to deal with everlasting 
reality and fundamental human experience can af- 
ford to be dated. The abandonment of the sanction 
of an infallible religious volume is not to be advo- 
cated because it is modern, but because it is criti- 
cally and scientifically a proved necessity. 

But every religious system, including Liberal- 
ism (and from now on, since we understand what 
it is and is not, we shall submit to the terminology 
of the mob and call it Modernism), must be based 
upon some assumption or other in which men can 
put their trust. Since the Modernist has no infal- 
lible Bible, to what can he turn, to what does he 
turn, as a basis of authority ? He has still one faith, 
usually as yet undisturbed. Protestantism, as we 
have said, had two, faith in the infallible book, and 
faith in the competence of the individual intellect. 
The Modernist has lost the former of these, but not 
the latter. He still puts his trust in the sufficiency 
of his own mind.* 


*T am well aware that there are some who call them- 


10 POSTMODERNISM 


The theory of Protestantism was that men are 
feeble creatures, unable to find God except God 
teach them by a book. Once they had the book they 
were quite clever enough to understand it and to 
proceed toward activity, and thought, and spiritual 
aspiration; but they had to have the book. They 
could not figure things out for themselves without 
it. Modernism would have it that men need no in- 
fallible direction of any sort, that they are capable 
rationally of discovering, by reasoning based upon 
scientific investigation, both what they are, their 
nature, their destiny, and also what the secret back 
of things is, what God is. We have nothing to lean 
back upon. We must and may safely rely upon our- 
selves. 

There is great nobility in this faith of the Mod- 
ernist. It is a high concept, this of man freed from 
priesteraft, independent of shibboleths, needing no 
revelation, not relying upon any ancient writings, 
master of his own soul, captain of his own fate, 
calm and dispassionate, unswerved by prejudice, 
fearlessly thinking his way toward that perfect 
Truth which is God. As long as men believe it is 
a true or possible picture of man, Modernism will 
seem a compelling solution of the religious prob- 
selves Modernists who are not intellectualists but mystics. 
They are exceptions to the rule. Moreover, they are rest- 
less in Modernist company. They are Postmodernists, at 


least in the making. It remains true that Modernism is 
definitely anti-mystical and rationalistic. 


POSTMODERNISM 1 


lem. But once let you, and me, and the man around 
the corner begin to suspect that, freed at last to think 
and by thinking arrive at Truth, human beings are 
congenitally incapable of doing any such thing, and 
Modernism will become as interesting an antiqua- 
rian curiosity as Calvinism is now. And that that is 
exactly what is happening is apparent to anyone at 
all in touch with contemporary thought, especially 
scientific thought. Modernism was, perhaps, mod- 
ern at the turn of the century, pregnant with pos- 
sibility as a religious method. That it remains so 
today no alert person can seriously maintain. Most 
of the leaders of Modernism are well past middle 
age. To the brainier youths it offers little attraction. 
It is a commonplace to note that scientific thinkers 
have no more use for Modernism than they have 
for orthodox Protestantism. This is because in 
1926 the Thinker is seen to be not the mythological 
figure of the Modernist, the young man upon the 
hill-top, head bravely lifted toward the stars, ex- 
pectant of the Truth; but rather, as Rodin has 
carved him, sitting and bent, wrestling with fact, 
his head upon his hand, puzzled, seeking but never 
finding, disillusioned, almost at the gate of despair. 
To the Thinker happy, optimistic Modernism 
seems a quintessence of outgrown sentimentalisms. 
If there is meaning to be found, and any peace, if 
there be a God, the man of today must achieve 
them otherwise. 


2. HOW WE TURNED TO SCIENCE 
FOR THE TRUTH 


HERE is only one essential difference between 

man and the rest of living things. That is his 
incessant search for Truth, accompanied by an in- 
sistent belief that somehow he can find it. The 
other animals know nothing of such endeavor. The 
cow, the fly, the elephant and the rest are appar- 
ently quite satisfied if they can sufficiently accom- 
modate themselves to their environment to insure 
food and shelter and opportunity to procreate their 
kind. Man, however, may have access to all these 
animal satisfactions and still remain anything but 
happy, or even contented. In him there is another 
urgent hunger, the hunger to know why. What is 
the world all about, what is the meaning of himself 
and his fellows, what is human destiny? To the 
consideration of these vital problems he is im- 
pelled by some inner necessity which will not be 
denied. 

It is this philosophical hunger which is the par- 
ent of all things peculiarly human. We have been 


POSTMODERNISM 13 


told for a long time now, by many of the intelli- 
gentsia, that our civilization is economically deter- 
mined. That theory is at once wise and extremely 
silly. It is quite true that the particular form in 
which human endeavor manifests itself is deter- 
mined by economic factors, but it is not these fac- 
tors which produce the endeavor. Even though man 
must, of necessity, give most of his time to grub- 
bing for food and shelter, it is not there that his 
imagination is focussed, nor there that his heart is 
fixed. Always subconsciously, and frequently con- 
sciously, he is seeking the meaning of things. His 
achievements are very largely by-products of that 
search. He will know the Truth, for until he does 
know it he is enslaved and knows no peace. This 
seeking shows itself within and behind all human 
artistry. Never was written a poem worth the 
reading that does not echo this quest for meaning. 
All great music throbs with its urgency. There is 
no art for art’s sake. All art exists for the sake of 
Truth, poignantly desired, elusively compelling. 
The artist may call it Beauty but, as Keats said a 
century ago, Truth and Beauty are names for the 
same thing. At the end of the rainbow lies the pot 
of gold. Always somewhere ahead, glimpsed in 
high moments but never quite perceived, lies 
Heaven. Now we see as in a reflecting mirror, 
darkly, what some day we must see face to face; 
and every artist knows it well. The beautiful, the 


14 POSTMODERNISM 


worth-while, all that is not beastly in our achieve- 
ment, is a by-product of this essentially human 
longing for the reason why. 

As the ages go on, once in a while men awake, 
shocked and startled, to a realization that Truth 
cannot be discovered any longer by the technic 
prevalent in their particular day and, since new 
technics are painful to acquire, they give up the 
struggle. “Away,” they say, “with all this unend- 
ing and hopeless searching. We can never know. 
Our methods are ridiculously futile. Life must 
remain an inscrutable mystery. Let us abandon 
the task. Let us, like beasts a little more clever, 
accommodate ourselves to the things that are tan- 
gible. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomor- 
row we die.” And they do eat and drink; but they 
are not merry. Rather their lives are filled with 
sadness. Those are the gloomy, the tragic, the 
ghastly periods in human history. But those times 
never last. Man is incurably a philosopher. The 
children of those who cease searching insist upon 
resuming the search. A new technic is somehow 
devised and the age-old quest again begins. 

Today we are in the midst, or rather, we are 
entering into the midst, of one of those ages of dis- 
illusionment and surrender. We of the twentieth 
century are rapidly realizing that our technic for 
the discovery of Truth, the scientific and rational 
technic that has been current for a century and a 


POSTMODERNISM 15 


half, is inadequate. We are waking to the knowl- 
edge that, wonderful as are the mechanical and 
technical by-products of that method, marvelous 
as is the store of particular facts which it has added 
to the treasury of human knowledge, it has told us 
nothing and apparently can tell us nothing about 
the things which we really need to know: about 
Truth and Beauty, and the why of things, and the 
destiny of our own lives. As we discover that the 
technic is inadequate we enter into a period of 
dazed hopelessness. 

It must have been great fun to live, especially 
in France, in the latter years of the eighteenth 
century, when first the thrilling conviction took 
hold of modern men that they could think their 
way toward essential Truth; when, like apostles of 
a new religion, the intelligentsia cried out, with 
passion, that men were reasoning beings, and be- 
lieved that in these words they had adequately de- 
scribed the race. “Let us, therefore, observe accu- 
rately, and from our data reason clearly. That is 
the path to what we long to know. All else is waste 
of time.” So their cry arose, and men believed 
them. Rapidly and surely their dogma spread 
through old Europe and into young America. It 
came to be the basic conviction back of the whole 
nineteenth century. No one can understand the 
nineteen-hundreds, especially the latter half of it, 
unless he knows that back of its statecraft, its so- 


16 POSTMODERNISM 


cial theories, its art, its literature, its philosophical 
speculation, was the firm belief that if we know 
enough facts and think hard enough about them 
we can discover the reason for living and the way 
to live and thus populate the world with good and 
happy persons. 

The natural result was an almost unprecedented 
growth in human conceit. Humility came to be so 
absurd that it was rarely thought of and pride 
dropped from its place as the deadliest of the seven 
sins to a negligible position as scarcely wrong at all. 
How astonishing was the nineteenth century! 
One contemplates with wonder the eminent Vic- 
torians; the Parisians of the Second Empire; the 
secularist giants, fanatics who insisted upon their 
complete rationality, who made possible a united 
Italy; the solemn German philosophers of the 
eighties and nineties; the imperialistic madmen of 
the end of the century who read Kipling, rejoiced 
in bearing the white man’s burden, gobbled up 
what markets they could, and drenched South 
Africa in needless blood. How could people have 
believed in themselves as these people believed in 
themselves? Was their sense of humor wholly 
atrophied? They laughed, it is true, for men must 
ever laugh at something, at what they deemed 
grotesque and ridiculous. They laughed at many 
of the things which the race has instinctively held 
sacred; but with rare exceptions—whom they 


POSTMODERNISM 17 


scorned, as, for example, Samuel Butler—they al- 
most never laughed at themselves. 

Why should they ? Were they not makers of, and 
participants in, what they deemed a golden age? 
They could not see, as we see, that it was really a 
grim, grey, iron age. They believed themselves the 
heirs to, and the vast improvers upon, the ages that 
had been. Gladly, confidently, they forged ahead 
upon their rational and practical investigations. 
They found out many things, some of them impor- 
tant things, a few of them tremendous things. They 
believed that soon and without doubt they or their 
children would know everything, or at least. every- 
thing worth knowing. The day of reason was come 
and its sun could never set. On the race would go, 
until by reason man really knew.* The key was 
the rational, the scientific method. They believed 
in it. They made it the beginning and the ending 
of education. They devoted their children to it 
with fervent hope. It was for them the final, the 
inevitable technic. 

As their most valued assumption, this was be- 
queathed to the Twentieth Century. When, a score 
of years ago, I set out upon my undergraduate 
career, almost without exception the men who 
taught us and sought intellectually to influence us, 


* One finds this Spencerian conviction still in the 
pseudo-scientific and pedagogical romances of that late 
survival of Victorianism, Mr. H. G. Wells. Even Mr. 
George Bernard Shaw is only beginning to outgrow it. 


18 POSTMODERNISM 


simply assumed without argument that the method 
was wholly adequate. If, occasionally, some daring 
young instructor presumed to doubt it, pressure 
was brought to bear sufficient to suppress him. No 
one wishes to appear a silly ass. 

Of course, with such a conviction as this central 
in thought, religion had to go by the board. In my 
student days, although I attended a great univer- 
sity controlled by a Protestant denomination, a uni- 
versity ostensibly founded on a religious basis, re- 
ligion was, for the most part, ignored as a thing of 
no intellectual value. Very few of the professors at- 
tacked it or even sneered at it. Public opinion was 
still strong enough then to keep sceptical pedagogs 
from too open utterance. But that religion must 
contribute toward the acquiring of knowledge, that 
it even might be of service in approaching Truth, 
that it was a key to the treasury of Reality, ap- 
parently never occurred to the faculty, at least to 
those who taught me, and I was from time to time 
under some of the most eminent men who lectured 
there. Thus it was wherever the more thinking 
people congregated. One was supposed to find out 
Truth merely by clear reasoning from accurately 
observed phenomena. How could religion be of any 
real importance? Despite the best efforts of those 
who seek to minimize the supernatural in religion, 
certainly it does deal with the unobservable. 


POSTMODERNISM 19 


“We know nothing which we cannot scientifically 
prove, or rationally and intellectually explain.” 
That was the current wisdom. One cannot ration- 
ally prove anything about God. One cannot 
scientifically demonstrate even that there is any 
God. 

In the face of that realization a few of us, hardy 
and dogmatic souls, became atheists and mechan- 
ists. Some of us, more shy, sought to dodge the 
issue and to hold to ancient forms of theological 
words which we carefully denatured of their orig- 
inal meanings. Most of us became frankly ag- 
nostics, and let it go at that. Maybe there was a 
God and maybe there was not. Why bother? 
The scientific method would lead us into all 
Truth. 

I have no doubt that the majority of ordinary 
people think so still. The man in the street is al- 
ways a couple of decades behind the man in the 
study. Mr. Babbitt’s modern thought was really 
modern about 1895. When I was a lad it was only 
by the leading minds that religion was regarded 
as negligible. Ordinary people still went to church 
and said their prayers. Indifference is now spread 
more widely. It is not that the citizen of Main 
Street has anything against religion. In fact he 
patronizes it ad nauseum, as he does music and as 
his wife does literature. He and his family simply 


20 POSTMODERNISM 


think of religion as a minor decorative art. For 
their realities they look to science. 

But meanwhile the man in the cloister of learn- 
ing has been changing his mind. 


3. HOW THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD 
HAS LIMITATIONS 


HE scientist is now of the opinion that the scien- 
tific technic is not, in itself, sufficient. 

During the past twenty years knowledge has 
grown and scientific methods have been improved 
with greater rapidity than in any single generation 
since history began. Modern thought of the nine- 
teen-twenties is, in consequence, vastly different in 
many vital respects from scientific thought in the 
eighteen-nineties. The chief of these differences 
can be expressed, possibly, with sufficient clearness 
when it is said that, while in 1895 practically 
every first-rate scientist assumed that man is ca- 
pable by observation and reason of discovering 
essential Truth about the universe and about him- 
self—assumed it without much thought and because 
he was engrossed in methodology—there is not a 
mind of premier rank in the world in 1925 which 
believes any such thing. The scientific intelligent- 
sia now realizes, and for the most part freely ad- 
mits, that, merely by scientific methods, nothing 


22 POSTMODERNISM 


of basic importance, of primary importance, of 
ontological importance, can be discovered. 

To the man in the street such a statement sounds 
bizarre, grotesque, absurd. It seems to him that he 
knows better. Does he not see for himself the mar- 
vels of science? Beneath the waters move ships; 
aeroplanes soar overhead ; he listens in at the radio; 
his motor cars are powerful and cheap; he trusts, 
poor fool, for national defence to high explosives 
and poisonous gases; he visits electrical plants and 
beholds how the lightning is harnessed both for 
great tasks and for menial services; when he is ill 
he is helped, and when he is well he is kept well, by 
super-modern medicine where germs are made to 
destroy germs and poisonous injections prevent 
poison ; he is told, truly, that almost every civilized 
product has been touched by the chemist. “If,” he 
says, ‘scientists can do all these marvelous things, 
and many others equally thrilling, it stands to rea- 
son that there must be in the halls of science men 
of superlative wisdom, men who truly know, men 
who can show us how to live and why. To these 
scientific supermen we may safely entrust our- 
selves and our children, our lives, our social struc- 
ture, our education, our arts, and our philosophy. 
No longer need we leave such matters to mere 
priests and prophets and cultural intuitionalists. 
Here are true geniuses. They know, where others 
merely guess.” 


POSTMODERNISM 23 


But, alas, in the halls of science there are no 
such persons. Daily more and more people are 
finding it out. Moreover, the better scientific minds 
are increasingly of the opinion that there never 
can be any such persons. Man does not, scien- 
tifically, know very much. He knows a vast deal 
more than his fathers knew; but beside what he 
does not know and can never by experiment dis- 
cover, what he has been able to learn is next to 
nothing. There are only three questions recognized 
by scientists as legitimately characteristic of sci- 
ence: “What is it?” “What does it do?” “How does 
it do it?” With the reason for things, scientific 
workers are not concerned. That lies beyond the 
frontiers of physical law, beyond the necessarily 
self-imposed limitations of science. There are even 
many scientists sufficiently humble to recognize that 
the question, “What is it?’ may possibly lead be- 
yond those limitations. Every time such a query is 
answered there arises a new one: “‘What, in turn, is 
that?’ The more we arrive at definitions the more 
does ultimate definition recede. Eventually we see 
that the final answer to “What?” inevitably in- 
volves “Why ?” Most scientific workers tacitly ad- 
mit, therefore, that all their work is done and must 
be done under great limitation. Working thus 
they can and do know many and important things ; 
but, in the last analysis, they never know what 
anything ultimately is. 


24 POSTMODERNISM 


To say this is not in the least to attack scientists 
or to disparage science. It is the leading scientists 
themselves who are saying it, such men as Bertrand 
Russell, and Milliken, and J. Arthur Thompson, 
for instance, in lectures, articles, and printed vol- 
umes. They are distressed to realize that the com- 
mon folk are expecting from them, on a basis of 
scientific surety, leadership in ethics, in philos- 
ophy, in social and political endeavor—leader- 
ship which they cannot in honesty pretend to be 
able to furnish. They freely and frequently say 
that science does not make its followers know, 
nearly as much as it makes them realize their 
ignorance. It is a rare thing to find a contem- 
porary scientist of reputation who is conceited. It 
is only the little, routine grubbers, the young 
bachelors of science who do hack work which the 
greater scientists may use, whom one ever hears 
postulating omniscience for their guild. There 
comes, there must come, to scientists a basic ag- 
nosticism more devastating than any agnosticism 
of the nineties. Then men doubted that they ever 
really could know God. Now they doubt that they 
ever really can know anything at all. 

The scientist gazes, for example, into the heay- 
ens, through instruments the power and intricacy 
of which would fill with wonder the astronomers 
of a century ago and which make the little tele- 
scope with which Galileo shocked his contem- 


POSTMODERNISM 25 


poraries seem a baby’s plaything. Worlds on worlds 
we know something about which our fathers neither 
knew nor suspected. We measure their distances 
and their relative sizes; we weigh them; we even 
discover their constituent chemical elements. There 
they float—in what? In the ether. And what is 
ether? It is matter which has no density, no 
weight, none of the properties of matter. It is this 
non-material matter which fills limitless space. As 
a matter of fact, when we say that, we really 
mean that we do not know what fills space. About 
the primary mystery of space itself we know not 
one whit more than our fathers knew. What is it? 
Why is it? Nobody has any certain information. 
As far as anyone can now see, no human mind can 
ever acquire information about it. And what is 
time, the complement of space? We are told that 
probably our planet is about eight billion years 
old. That is one of the late guesses. Hight billion 
years is quite a while, but what is such a period in 
comparison with apparently endless ages before 
and endless ages yet to come? And in the terms of 
these maddening things, time and space, what is 
this little earth, on which we set up our devices and 
gaze into the night? There is no scientific answer ; 
none whatever. Before limitless bigness the human 
intellect faces a dilemma; it may surrender or it 
may crack; it does not, cannot comprehend. 

We turn from such considerations with a sense 


26 POSTMODERNISM 


of hopeful relief to the study of matter in the 
small. “Atoms, molecules, positive and negative 
electrons”—we talk much about them. But what 
really are they? An atom would seem to be a unit 
of matter marvelously tiny. Within each atom 
there are, first, outer electrons and, second, inner 
electrons, all whirling in ellipses. The former take 
part in ordinary chemical reactions, such as com- 
bustion; their movements determine the ‘‘chemical 
qualities” of the elements. When the latter, the inner 
ones, are disturbed, we have radio-activity. When 
electrons pass from an inner ellipse to an outer one, 
according to some very late investigators, we have 
light. All of that is interesting, but even more in- 
teresting is the thought of those reaches of space in 
which in each atom, the electrons, separated by rel- 
atively gigantic distances, are moving at their tre- 
mendous speeds. The inner electrons in the nucleus 
or inmost center of the atom are of the order of 
10° mm apart, or about 30,000,000 times their 
diameter. One-thirty-millionth of the atom is elec- 
tron. The rest is space. In the outer portions of the 
atom they are even more widely separated.* This 
seemingly solid paper, the apparently solid moun- 
tain on the top of which I pen these words, are 
alike as porous as a sponge, and much more so. 
Every atom of these seemingly static and stable 


* Based on figures in Walker’s Introduction to Physical 
Chemistry. 


POSTMODERNISM 27 


things is a little universe, itself filled with vast 
reaches of “ether” and all whirling at dizzying 
speeds. Even every breath of air is made up of 
microscopic solar systems, which nonchalantly I 
inhale and exhale, like a god. Infinite Lilliput is 
no less disconcerting than infinite Brobdingnag. 

At the heart of matter is, then, what ? We ask the 
physical chemist and he replies that he is not sure 
but that probably everything that is is really energy. 
We inquire further what that means, exactly, and 
if he is honest—and most physicists and chemists 
are almost painfully honest—he tells us that it 
really is a way of saying that he gives it up. What 
matter is is at present, and probably will remain 
for the future, a thing beyond the comprehension 
of the race. Limitlessness, whether of largeness or 
of smallness, is incomprehensible. 

And what is man, thus poised precariously be- 
tween the greater and the lesser mysteries? We 
ask the biologist first. He tells us plainly that man 
is an animal. Possibly some of us feel inclined to 
quarrel with that definition as tending unduly to 
simplify the problem; but, even if we are willing 
to take him at his word, the answer is not very 
simple after all. What is an animal? He says that 
an animal is an organism, i.e., a particle or a com- 
bination of particles of living substance capable, 
under proper conditions, of preserving and sus- 
taining itself. But we are compelled to ask still 


28 POSTMODERNISM 


another question. What, precisely, is meant by 
living substance? What is life? If our biologist is 
accurate and scientific—and most of them try to be 
both—he frankly admits that he does not khow 
what life is. 

We then turn to the sociologist, not without cer- 
tain protests on the part of other scientists that 
sociology is not truly a science at all. We ask him 
what man is. Man, he replies, is essentially a social 
being. But, we rejoin, terms must be defined. We 
can never understand what a social being is until 
we have some idea of what a being is. To answer 
that, says the sociologist, with commendable 
modesty, is not the province of his department. 

It is with a breath-taking realization that 
physics, and chemistry, and astronomy, and biol- 
ogy, the older science, and even sociology, if it be 
a science, cannot answer the riddle of life, that 
many of the better informed and therefore more 
disillusioned common folk have turned hopefully 
to psychology. Since we cannot learn our destiny 
from the study of nature, inanimate and animate, 
or from the study of social phenomena, we may 
find a clew in the examination of man’s mental 
processes. Therefore we, also, turn to the psychol- 
ogist with our insistent question. Sir, what is man ? 

Unless he be a very new-fashioned behaviorist 
indeed, he answers that, whatever more man may 
-or may not be, at least he is a self-conscious being. 


POSTMODERNISM 29 


Of course that throws him back at once upon the 
problem of what is consciousness. If our psychol- 
ogist is scientific—and most of them would rather 
perish than even to appear to be anything else—he 
will admit that nobody can define consciousness. 
He probably has his own theory, but it is only a 
theory, no more and no less valuable than the 
guess of any other man. If, however, the psychol- 
ogist is a behaviorist, he will pour good-natured 
scorn upon our question and insist that it matters 
not at all what man is, as long as one can observe 
the fascinating things man does. In other words, 
he tells us that our quest is hopeless, which is pre- 
cisely what we cannot admit without surrender. 
Nor is the psychologist content to stop there. He 
further proceeds to take from us what little still 
remains of our intellectual self-respect. He bids us 
understand that the human brain, the sole instru- 
ment we have wherewith to record impressions and 
to reason from them, is but a fallible and most un- 
reliable instrument. Our senses continually play us 
false. We are great fools if we wholly believe what 
we seem to see, and hear, and touch, and taste, and 
smell. He shows us, too, with evidence hard to 
dodge and plausibility difficult to resist, that man 
is hardly the reasoning being we have been wont 
to suppose; that, whereas we think we reason out 
our conduct and our convictions, as a matter of 
fact for once that we do this we are moved, and 


30 POSTMODERNISM 


our actions and convictions determined by, emo- 
tions, prejudices, reflexes from external stimula- 
tions, inherited warps, and inhibitions of all sorts. 
He smiles as he informs us that one of our chief 
mental activities is persuading ourselves that we 
have reasoned out things which have arisen not at 
all from reason. In short, he insists, calmly but 
devastatingly, that mere reason is not necessarily 
an adequate guide to Truth at all. What would 
Voltaire have said if he had been told that? 

As a matter of fact, science has revealed to 
man nothing about what are time, or space, or life, 
or consciousness, or matter itself, much less about 
what is man and what is his destiny. This ought 
to be faced clearly, as clearly as the leaders of 
science themselves are facing it. The only possible 
end of the scientific method, unless that method be 
augmented extra-scientifically, is honest and com- 
plete agnosticism about everything and frank sur- 
render in man’s age-old battle toward Truth and 
toward a meaning for the universe and himself 
within it. We pride ourselves upon our great sin- 
cerity. Indeed we are sincere, to an extraordinary 
degree. Consequently, by leaps and bounds our 
generation is reaching this stone wall. No wonder 
we are restless, unhappy, distrait. 


4. HOW OUR SITUATION IS NOT 
WITHOUT PRECEDENT 


AcE to face with the impasse of which we have 

been speaking, the first reaction of a sensible 
man is to say, “What of it? Let us drop this ridic- 
ulous problem of what and why and busy ourselves 
with life’s concrete and specific tasks. Surely there 
is enough to be done. If we employ ourselves with 
sufficient activity we shall not find ourselves hope- 
lessly unhappy. We shall somehow muddle along.” 
That is what our generation, apart from occasional 
men of thought, offers as its solution, usually sub- 
conscious, to the problem before us. Surely therein 
hes our greatest danger of the moment, that we 
shall become a race of frantic muddlers, intensely 
busy going somewhere, never mind where, tripping 
one another up, finding the turmoil in the end 
futile and even ridiculous. Purposeless bustle is 
the parent of banal mediocrity. Already we are at 
once an imitative and a leaderless people, easy vic- 
tims of crowd psychology, standardized not merely 
in our ideas but in such fascinatingly human 


32 POSTMODERNISM 


things as dress, and manners, and speech, a gen- 
eration when men seek the easy and the popular 
way and few dare walk alone. In the arts, in state- 
craft, in education, in what passes for philosophy, 
this is true. How can it.be else? Who will pioneer 
if there can be found no sure approach to Truth ? 
Who cares to blaze new trails if all trails lead 
alike to nowhere? If we can never know what we 
are or why we are, how is leadership possible? Who 
dares lead anybody anywhere if no one may first be 
sure ? 

The inevitable result of this agnosticism spouse 
everything cannot help but be moral cowardice, 
spiritual surrender, and racial paralysis. We ap- 
proach rapidly the place occupied by a cynic of 
long-ago, whose question, ‘‘What is Truth?’ seems 
at first glance merely an abstract inquiry. It 
sounded academic enough, but it resulted in a 
ghastly crime—on Golgotha. As gradually the con- 
viction that man can scientifically discover nothing 
of his ultimate destiny sinks into the until now 
hopeful human mind—and day by day more peo- 
ple come to understand that fact—what impotence 
of character, what ghastly drabness in moral pur- 
pose, what deadly and hopeless dulness creeps 
upon us. 

What a modern man was Pontius Pilate! He de- 
serves our sympathy and today ought easily to get 
it. He might be wrong. Who knew? He did not. 


POSTMODERNISM 33 


How could the poor man, thus uncertain,. stand 
against crowd madness? He was a creature of his 
age. How much like our own day was that era of 
the old world into which Christ came, we do not 
enough understand. Ferrero and other modern . 
historians have shown us political: and economic 
parallels between Augustan civilization and ours; 
but the philosophical parallel is even more striking. 

Imperial Rome was the spiritual child of two 
cultures, Greek and Italian. The Greeks were a 
people distinguished for many things, but chiefly 
for this, that they sought for Truth upon an intel- 
tectual, a rational basis. Early in their develop- 
ment they discarded religion, relegated the gods 
to the limbo of interesting protagonists of human 
ideas and, like our immediate forefathers, although 
without their equipment for scientific observation, 
attempted to reduce life to rational formulae. And, 
even as we have found out, so they at length dis- 
covered that this cannot adequately be done. Their 
attempt was tragically ineffective. They were 
serious about it, with an almost deadly serious- 
ness. Their ancestral supernaturalism, as we 
have said, they soon abandoned. They were, in 
the time when their culture flowered, in no sense 
pagan. They had no religion at all, or were as near 
to that atheistic state as any people ever has been 
in history. 

Exactly to the extent that this became true 


34 POSTMODERNISM 


of them, they also lost their sense of joy. They 
ceased to get fun out of living. They were a serious 
and a sad people. It is interesting to note how 
lacking was their sense of humor. They wrote 
magnificent epics in which nobody laughs, except 
when drunk, or smiles, save for purposes of seduc- 
tion. They made play into a system of ethical cul- 
ture, with a deadly seriousness not equalled even 
by that eminent Victorian, Dr. Arnold. They com- 
posed tremendous tragedies, full of beautiful des- 
pair and lovely hopelessness; and satires and ex- 
travaganzas redolent with caustic wit; but they 
seem to have written no comedies worth preserv- 
ing. Their architecture has a cold finality about it 
that speaks of pride and death rather than of 
vibrant humanity. Even today it is recognized by 
the sure instinct of the people as appropriate for 
cemeteries. It had no note of growth in it. Can one 
imagine a more deadly motto than their favorite, 
“Nothing in excess?’ Like all people who think 
instead of feel, they had little or no compunction 
about the rightness of building up a culture for 
themselves on the shoulders of their sweating 
slaves. Like all people who have belittled love of 
woman, they were largely addicted to horrid and 
unnatural vices. In short, the Greeks were cer- 
tainly the most intellectual people in all history, 
and, with almost equal certainty, the most dull. 
They could think. For sheer rationality neither 


POSTMODERNISM 35 


Plato nor Aristotle has been equalled since their 
day. For a long time these Hellenes tremendously 
impressed the world by their calm assumption that 
they could solve human problems by a rationality 
which was the ancient equivalent of what we call 
the scientific method; but they never did so solve 
them. Socrates foretold the decay of that glory 
which was Greece when, after a moment of cosmic 
doubt, he informed his friends that he was as- 
suredly the wisest man in Athens because no one 
there really knew anything and he alone knew that. 
A troublesome fellow was this Socrates! he had 
most upsetting ideas. He drank the hemlock; and 
Greece went on. The ancient world, even the Greek 
world, at length came around to his opinion. It 
woke from its dream of purely rational adequacy. 
Men grew weary of philosophy and hopeless of re- 
sults from thought; and the center of culture 
moved inevitably from Athens, the seat of think- 
ing, to Rome, the city of action. 

“Away with all this pother about Truth,” said 
not merely Pilate but Rome itself. The Eternal 
City took over, greedily, without ever under- 
standing its real meaning, Greek civilization as it 
stood: philosophy, aesthetics, art, poetic formulae, 
even its sad vestigial remnants of a religion. She 
made excellent, machine-tooled imitations of the 
things which once in Greece had been spontaneous. 
Then she devoted her time and effort to the prac- 


36 POSTMODERNISM 


tical task of building an empire. Nobody seems to 
have stopped to ask why there should be an empire. 
Almost no one attempted to make any sense of im- 
perialism. Everybody hid from theory as much as 
possible. Rome had its grandmotherly philosophers 
and moralists, to be sure, its Ciceros, and Senecas, 
and the rest, but it rendered them about the same 
honor and respect that the average American busi- 
ness man gives nowadays to professors of pure, as 
distinct from applied, knowledge. They were re- 
spectable to have about, but the real job lay in 
imperial service. It was the day of the man who 
gets things done. 

By our Lord’s time this hurly-burly had gone 
on until it, too, was beginning to seem more than 
a bit of a bore. Civilization appeared to many a 
load almost past bearing. Men were, to use a mod- 
ern parallel, ‘fed up with the white man’s bur- 
den.” Imperial patriotism was a thing more of 
compulsion and of habit than of the heart. People 
were realizing more and more that, if thinking 
was no way to get at ultimate reality, neither was 
mere doing things. The bustle was losing its nar- 
cotic effect. Not only the Greek technic but also the 
Roman technic had been tried and found wanting. 
That world which was the residuum of both was 
wearied, hopeless, cynical. It had gone far on the 
path which men pursue whenever they abandon 
the search for reality. It gorged and guzzled and 


POSTMODERNISM ; 37 


otherwise indulged itself carnally, in an effort to 
hide from the insoluble. And these substitutes were 
rapidly growing, as they always do grow, tasteless 
and insufficient. 

Into this deadly dull era of imperial pomposity, 
organized bustle, collapsing imitation philosophy, 
and bored humanity came Christianity out of 
Syria in the hands of the Apostles and particu- 
larly of Saint Paul. Within a few short genera- 
tions it permeated and captured the civilized 
world. 

At first thought it seems astonishing that the 
sophisticated, over-organized, blasé Roman world 
should thus rapidly have surrendered to what must 
have struck it as a crudely simple faith, a religion 
which had originated in one of the least esteemed 
of its provinces. To account for this remarkable 
capitulation many explanations have been offered. 
Some have said that its pure and lofty moral ideals 
attracted a sensual people. That explanation is 
popular with those who estimate Christianity as 
an ethical rather than a religious movement, who 
look on Christ not as one who claimed to be God, 
but merely as an admirable and gentle moralist. 
One has only to study into the facts of the early 
centuries a little, however, to discover that, con- 
sidered merely as an ethics, Christianity could ill 
have competed with the older, more urbane, and 
altogether delightful teachings of Stoicism or Epi- 


38 POSTMODERNISM 


cureanism. Beside them it must have seemed crude 
and badly formulated. Also, when the conversion 
had been accomplished we see a Christianity in 
which worship and message alike are far from 
being primarily ethical. It was as a religion that 
it won its way. Lately there have been those who 
have insisted that Christianity owed its early prog- 
ress to its revolutionary, working-class bias. No 
explanation could be more grotesque. It is true that 
its earliest converts were persons of little or no 
social position. It is true that certain sects of early 
Christianity sought to make of their religion the 
sanction for revolutionary activity. It is, however, 
rather difficult to find evidence that the orthodox 
Christian message was more than incidentally 
concerned with economic principles. Certainly 
Pauline Christianity, which, whatever be its 
merits, happens to be the Christianity that actually 
did the converting in question, contained nothing 
of a class-conscious or socially inflammatory na- 
ture. Even he does write that there are few of po- 
sition among the early converts but, on the other 
hand, he always preferred to work with people of 
more than ordinary education, and he rejoiced to 
state that there were beginning to be those even of 
the Emperor’s household who had embraced his 
faith. The hypothesis of a working-class Church 
will not hold water. It is true that many of the 
early fathers denounce the holding of wealth and 


POSTMODERNISM 39 


dilate upon the wickedness of the wealthy; but 
candid examination of their utterances would seem 
to show that, far from being desirous of more 
widely distributing that wealth among the larger 
masses of the workers—in the fashion of modern 
radicals—they felt that its possession by anyone 
was incompatible with an undivided search for 
contact with God. Such a position may be argued 
against with some justice, on the ground that no 
social order at all is possible upon a basis of uni- 
versal scorn for the things of this world; but it is 
not possible to maintain that men who held this 
notion were working-class economic agitators. It is 
also true that various Emperors persecuted the new 
religion because of its revolutionary character; 
but again a little investigation will show that its 
revolutionary message was one of non-participa- 
tion in imperial projects rather than one of eco- 
nomic upset. 

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real 
reason why Christianity spread rapidly among all 
classes, rich and poor, masters and slaves, the real 
reason why it captured the world, was that it gave 
to a people who had despaired of getting anywhere 
by either rationalism or imperialism a seemingly 
workable method for the pursuit of Truth. Men 
grasped this new technic with eagerness. They 
found that it gave to them renewed hope and joy. 
Into what had been darkness, to use an image com- 


40 POSTMODERNISM 


mon to both St. Paul and St. John, there shone 
a light. 

Our own age is, as has been said, extraordinarily 
like that of Augustan Rome. We have had three 
assumed goods, in the attainment of which our im- 
mediate fathers sought for meaning in living. They 
pursued these ends with confidence and hope. We 
still pursue them, without much of either, more 
because of inertia than because we really esteem 
them worth the struggle. Our civilization is a 
web in which the warp is Reason and the woof a 
twist of Activity and Comfort. Some of us esteem 
the warp more highly; some, the woof. There are 
those who, despite what the modern world knows 
of the limitations of the modern method and the 
fallibility of the human brain, still have their 
fanatical over-belief in the sufficiency of Reason. 
Others, more numerous perhaps, have scorned the 
dim precincts of the study for the busier world of 
industry, finance, imperial endeavor. They still 
hope to find by sheer activity what life is all about, 
to taste it and to find it good. Greater still, and 
every year more great, is the number of those who 
carry-on, slaving in the building up of industry, 
the promotion of commerce, the seeking of im- 
perial markets, the organizing of everything upon 
which organizing hands may be laid, with no 
marked hope that the whole hullabaloo called 
civilization either means or can mean anything. 


POSTMODERNISM 4l 


They find it easier to swim with the current than 
to resist it. 

Then there are those who, having despaired of 
both thought and activity, have for satisfaction in 
life become frank hedonists, living daintily or 
beastly as their taste may dictate, given over to 
the creed of ease. “Blessed are the comfortable,” 
is their sole beatitude. This is at the present mo- 
ment a growing cult among our younger people. 
For it some people damn them, as though their 
hedonism was not the result of having lost their 
faith in the older half-gods still worshipped, with 
questionable wisdom, by their fault-finding elders. 
But worse than damning youth for what it is, is 
the failure, on the part of middle-aged sentimen- 
talists, to perceive about the younger generation 
what are the simple facts. That our colleges and 
the other haunts of youth are filled with starry- 
eyed young idealists is grotesquely untrue. It is no 
kindness to youth to tell lies about it, even bene- 
volent lies. Modern higher education, for instance, 
is largely what youth demands it to be, devoted to 
the notion that the end and aim of learning and 
thinking and working is to produce padding for 
the human race. By accumulating some of this 
padding men and women can shield themselves 
from too much reality. They can comfortably labor 
a little, comfortably mate, have not too many—and 
increasingly fewer—comfortable little children 


42 POSTMODERNISM 


(watched over by comfortable nursemaids and 
comfortable pedagogs), live in comfortable houses, 
dress in comfortable garments, belong to comfort- 
able clubs, enjoy comfortable holidays, pass into 
comfortable old age and sink at last into comfort- 
able, water-tight, upholstered graves. Like it or not, 
that is the impression of life’s realities which pre- 
vails on college campuses, at least in America. Al- 
most the only pedagogical question which the 
average student, unaided by outside suggestion, 
ever thinks of asking about his own training is 
this, “What does this course or that buy me?” 
The hopeful thing—what some people call the 
dangerous thing—is that there is among young peo- 
ple a small but growing group which rejects this 
philosophy not merely as ignoble but as idiotic. 
That man’s destiny is merely Sybaritic seems to 
them the nonsense that the race, during the ages, ac- 
tually has found it to be. They are in revolt. Some 
of them used to think that they were in revolt 
merely against contemporary economics. They took 
out their resentment in damning modern society. 
From soapboxes they shouted their message to the 
working-classes, who did not know whether to 
laugh or to get angry. Every college had its so- 
cialist club, whose idealist members would have 
made Karl Marx foam with wrath. Now they, for 
the most part, have come to see that their resent- 
ment runs deeper and extends more widely. They 


POSTMODERNISM __. 43 


are in revolt against the complacency, the smug- 
ness, the mere carnality of contemporary life. 
They are demanding that honesty be more highly 
evaluated than efficiency, truth more highly than 
materialistic shibboleths. But the fact that they 
scorn the way of Main Street does not mean that 
they themselves have anything to offer as a sub- 
stitute. They have no notion of what is right; 
they know merely that almost everything that is 
seems wrong. Like the somewhat older group led 
by Messrs. Mencken, Nathan, and the like, they 
are healthy and hope-inspiring but they have 
not moved from the ery of revolt to the demand 

reconstruction. They insist that man was 
not made to be the unhappy, timid, and inglorious 
creature which the twentieth century has left 
him. These restless youths are the hope of the 
world. They will not much longer be content with 
mere negations. As in numbers and intensity of 
feeling they grow greater they will, before many 
years have passed, hit upon some positive solution 
to life’s problem. Most of them think it will be, 
when it comes, a brand-new solution. They are 
mostly, like all young people, too preoccupied in 
themselves to see mankind in the perspective of 
history. They do not see that often a rediscovery 
is the most revolutionary sort of discovery. At any 
rate, day by day, there are more of them thinking, 
even though at present they are but a tiny leaven 


44 POSTMODERNISM 


in the mass of youthful complacency; and day by 
day they see a little more clearly that man’s an- 
cient pursuit, his inevitable inquisition, is the 
quest for Truth. He must know why. 

Even as Christianity offered a new technic in 
the days of Rome, so it may be again. Christianity 
can do nothing whatever in a day when men be- 
lieve in their own intellectual sufficiency. It could 
do next to nothing for the nineteenth century. In 
this later era, now that we know, or at least are 
rapidly learning, that rationally we can arrive 
Nowhere, now that we perceive that the great gods, 
Reason, and Activity, and Comfort, all have feet of 
clay, now that we know not whither to turn to find 
the way out of a hurly-burly bore, Christianity may 
do much. It may do everything. But that it may 
do anything, it is necessary that we perceive, at 
least a little, what the Christian technic really is. 


5. HOW GOD BECAME COMPREHENSIBLE 


HRISTIANITY is a religion based upon agnos- 

ticism. No one has ever been able to be an in- 
telligent Christian until he has become an agnostic 
first. It is a faith for men who think all they can 
but who nevertheless are intellectually humble, 
which is only another way of saying that it is a 
faith for people with common sense and a sense 
of humor. Except in the highly artificial atmos- 
phere of super-civilizations man knows quite well 
that he does not really understand the basic things. 
In fact he instinctively rejoices in the mystery of 
reality. He is naturally a poet. Poetry is more 
basic in him than is pedantry. The sense of mys- 
tery is the only really common sense. Nowadays 
the greatest scientists are, quite as often as not, the 
greatest mystics; the highest knowledge goes with 
the most humble heart. Men are again agnostics. 
Once more Christianity can come into its own. It 
makes no attempt to explain the unexplainable or, 
as the negro pastor said, “to unscrew the in- 
scrutable.” It seeks sufficient knowledge by an- 
other path. 


46 POSTMODERNISM 


Its first postulate is that personality is as real 
as matter or thought; and that, in consequence, 
the technic of finding out reality involves not 
merely activity and reason but also love; that 
Truth is not merely a syllogism to be mastered but 
also a Person to be adored. 

So ignorant are we today of the concepts of re- 
ligion that there are actually those who seem to 
think that when Christians say that God, or Ulti- 
mate Reality, is a Person, they mean that some- 
where he has a localized habitat in space and even 
that He is enclosed in a material body, with hands 
and feet and so forth, such as we possess. What is 
really meant by personality is, of course, self- 
conscious existence. One needs no demonstration, 
indeed one can have none, of that concept without 
acceptance of which all other concepts are impos- 
sible, namely that one is one’s self a person in the 
sense mentioned; that apart from and possessing 
one’s body there is the reality of one’s own being. 
Christianity states without fear of contradiction 
that human personality is not only the most impor- 
tant thing about one, but the only basically im- 
portant thing. Everybody knows, without proof, 
when he thinks about it, that that person which is 
himself can do three great and important things. 
He can act through the agency of his body; he 
can think and reason, with the assistance of his 
brain; and he can love other persons. Christianity 


POSTMODERNISM 47 


insists that this last function of personality is 
quite as basic as either of the others and that the 
fullness of personal existence is impossible without 
the exercise of it. Christ went so far as to say 
that love is man’s chief activity; that his whole 
duty is summed up in loving; that to love God with 
all the heart, and soul, and strength, and mind is 
the first great commandment and that the second 
great commandment, to love one’s neighbor, is the 
necessary implication of the first. It is important 
to note that to Christ loving, while it involves men- 
tal activity and bodily activity, also involves some- 
thing independent of these; that it is also a thing 
of the heart and soul. It has its non-material, non- 
intellectual elements. Love is not primarily physi- 
cal, although it may enlist the most intimate 
physical contacts as means of expression. Nor is it 
primarily rational. One’s love for one’s sweetheart 
or one’s father is certainly not the result of reason, 
nor does one persuade one’s self by syllogism to 
care about one’s child. One loves; then one reasons 
about it and gives it expression. The love itself is a 
deeper thing. One’s personality realizes and values 
the existence of some other personality. Chris- 
tianity’s first truth is, then, that we are persons. 
This we have, to an astonishing degree, forgotten. 
What strange definitions one hears of humanity. 
“Man is a tool-wielding animal.” ‘Man is the crea- 
ture of his environment.” ‘‘Man is an animal 


48 POSTMODERNISM 


which cooks its food.” ‘Man is a rational being.” 
All are true definitions and all are ridiculously in- 
adequate. The only perfect definition is that man 
is a person who can love. 

To attain to knowledge, therefore, about the 
realities of life, man must love. This is true even 
in the acquiring of knowledge about human beings. 
If I am to understand my age, my world, I must 
have more than a knowledge of the facts involved. 
I must sense personalities. Not alone with weigh- 
ing machine and measuring rod, with chemical 
analysis and genetic tables and psychiatric test, 
is humanity to be understood. I cannot know men 
and women until to some extent at least I have 
fallen in love with men and women, experienced 
them as mystically akin to me and found them as 
beautiful and as absurd, as ridiculous and as tragi- 
cal, as mirth-provoking and as tear-compelling as 
I am myself. Nothing can be really known about 
them, individually or collectively, until love has 
revealed it. 

Christianity further maintains that essential 
Truth, ultimate Reality, God, the Secret of 
Things, the Everlasting Why, is also a Person, a 
self-conscious Being, not merely a syllogism or a 
rationalization; and that as such He is to be dis- 
covered, not merely by investigating Him and rea- 
soning about Him, but first of all by loving Him 
and being loved by Him. Religion is the art of dis- 


POSTMODERNISM 49 


covering, through love, Him who is back of and 
through and behind all things. It is a way toward 
Truth. It does not consist in intellectual specula- 
tions, although one can reason about religion once 
one has experienced it. Nor is it merely a code of 
conduct, although certain standards of living are 
bound to result from it. It has a philosophy and it 
has an ethic; but it itself is neither. The former is 
an attempt to express realities otherwise discovered 
and the latter is the outcome of the discovery. Re- 
ligion is a matter of personal contacts between God 
and men. 

To be sure not merely Christianity, but every 
other religion as well, involves attempts to bring 
about such personal contacts. The word religion 
means that which binds together the unseen Be- 
ing and ourselves. If that had been all there was 
to Christianity, if it had been merely what the 
Arians tried to make it and what Unitarians still 
would have it, it would have met in the Graeco- 
Roman World only the mental reaction which such 
religion meets today. Men would have said then 
as they say now, ‘“‘Even admitting the contention 
that Truth is personal, we find little to help us in 
your system. How can we, who are persons im- 
prisoned within the limitations of time and space, 
establish such contacts as shall constitute love with 
a Person utterly free from those restrictions, One 
who must be, if He is at all, Omnipotent, and 


50 POSTMODERNISM 


Omniscient, and Omnipresent. To find Truth, if 
that is what Truth is, we should have to escape 
completely from the flesh. From the Orient,” they 
would have continued, ‘‘before you there have come 
mystics, taught by Zoroaster or in the lore of the 
Buddha, telling us that we must and can so escape 
from the flesh. They teach that only by some sort 
of self-hypnosis which removes us from the world 
of sense can we find Reality; that, in some strange 
ways, we can get out of the world of three dimen- 
sions into the world of four. Possibly there may 
be some few exceptional people who can do this; 
but we cannot. Indeed, compelled by strong in- 
stinct, we will not try to do so. The effort seems 
too pregnant with possible disaster to our sanity. 
We cannot get to your Personal God, even if we ad- 
mit that He is and that He is personal. There is no 
help in this sort of thing. If you have no answer 
to this difficulty, we shall not listen either long or 
patiently.” 

In the answer which Christianity made, and 
still makes, to this entirely proper and sensible 
plea lay, and still lies, its unique message to the 
world, its ancient, present, and everlasting appeal. 

It said, “All that you say of the difference be- 
tween the Person of God and the persons of men is 
true. He is unlimited. He is incomprehensible. It 
is also true that we cannot escape from time and 
space and live as gods. We see in part; we under- 


POSTMODERNISM 51 


stand in part. We cannot find Him. But there is 
another alternative. He can find us. If you were 
God and wished to give your love to men and to 
be loved by them, and they could not live or think 
or love in that realm not of time or space which 
was your essential habitat, what would you do? 
You would of necessity limit yourself, place your- 
self within the realm of time and space, not cease 
to be your limitless self and yet live also as they 
live. You would remain God and yet become man. 
They could not reach you but you could and would 
reach them. That we declare God has done. Within 
the realm of time and space came God incarnate, 
in all points tried and limited as we are, yet per- 
fect God all the while. In the womb of a Virgin by 
divine creative power was conceived a Child. From 
His mother He took every human essential. From 
the Eternal He came, in very perfection, Deity. 
Born He was and lived, and grew, and labored, and 
loved, and died upon a Cross to which blinded 
men condemned Him because of the man-shaming 
beauty of His lite. But God cannot be annihilated 
nor His will in becoming Incarnate be thwarted. 
From the grave He rose again to continued life. He 
left our sight at last, but He still lives on, forever 
Incarnate, forever God and Man. We have known 
Him and loved Him. We have known and loved 
God. We still love the Eternal and are loved by 
Him. In holy sacraments the human hand of God 


52 POSTMODERNISM 


still touches, strengthens, and ennobles. Even now 
we feel His infinite and yet finite compassion. We 
have known the Truth and the Truth has made us 
free.” 

It was this personal religion of an Incarnate 
God which swept the ancient world. Ever since, 
Jesus has been making men and women free, free 
from the inhibitions of mere intellectualism, free 
from the despair which lies at the end of all fear- 
less thinking, free too, from the senseless round of 
inane activity, free to live and to laugh and to love 
and to dare. Some of them have been simple- 
minded people, like Francis of Assisi and John 
Wesley and Joan of Are and Our Most Blessed 
Lady of Nazareth; but some of them have been 
among the mightiest thinkers of the world, like 
Origen and Abelard and Paul and Aquinas and 
Pasteur and Fabre and Romanes. Such people 
used their reason; but to them reason was not the 
only path toward Truth. By love toward and from 
Incarnate Deity they derived their knowledge of 
the things past knowledge, the things which matter 
most. 


6. POSSIBLE PRINCIPLES OF 
POSTMODERNISM 


HE Church can never be content with other 

than a positive message. The world is waiting 
for religious leadership; and no leadership is ac- 
complished by negation. To insist upon Fundamen- 
talism is to offend the good sense of the age; but 
mere denial of Fundamentalism is not enough. 
There must be affirmation, compelling affirmation. 
Modernism or Liberalism has as yet furnished 
little by way of substitute and even that which it 
has supplied, dependence upon the scientific 
method and the appeal to reason, will, as has been 
said, not suffice in a world convinced that for re- 
ligious discovery scientific research can be of no 
service whatever and that the human reason is in- 
capable, by virtue of inherent limitations, of deal- 
ing adequately with the problems involved; that 
by definition religion deals with the super-scien- 
tific and the more than reasonable. The time would 
seem to be at hand for a new school of religious 
aspirants, one in accord not with the prejudices of 


54 POSTMODERNISM 


scientists of a generation ago, but rather consonant 
with the convictions of scientists today. Funda- 
mentalism is hopelessly outdated. Modernism has 
ceased to be modern. We are ready for some sort of 
Postmodernism. 

It would be presumptuous for any one man to 
attempt to describe fully what that Postmodernism 
must be as it comes into its own. The need of the 
world for intelligent religion will call forth, is 
indeed calling forth, a great deal of earnest re- 
sponse. The Spirit of the Living God will create 
Postmodernism and in its making many indi- 
viduals, as they seek to find answers to the prob- 
lems involved, must make their contributions. All 
that one man can do is to state what, in a judg- 
ment based upon his own experience as a searcher 
for the Truth and his dealing with other intelli- 
gent men similarly engaged today, are some prob- 
able characteristics of Postmodernism. It is in that 
spirit, and with no illusion of peculiar inspiration 
from the Eternal to become the lone prophet of a 
new day, that I here set down some of the prin- 
ciples which must, as I see it, be those of the Post- 
modernist if he is to give spiritual leadership to 
our puzzled generation. 

1. Only on the basis of the Incarnation is re- 
ligion possible for an educated man today. If, in 
the pages that have preceded this, it has not been 
made plain what that means, any further at- 


POSTMODERNISM 55 


tempted elucidation would be useless. Suffice it to 
say further only that, at the moment at least, 
the emphasis needs to be upon the necessity for 
and the fact of the Incarnation rather than upon 
the manner of the Incarnation. ‘The man who has 
accepted the Incarnation as a basis for religion 
does not often have much trouble in believing that 
when the Eternal came into humanity it was by 
process of partheno-genesis. Virgins give birth in 
the lower forms of life, as every biologist knows, 
and that such a thing should have happened, by 
the power of God, when the Virgin Mary con- 
ceived her son, offers no insuperable difficulty to 
one who believes that what was happening was no 
ordinary human conception but a unique event. 
Argument from the Virgin Birth to the Incarna- 
tion probably never convinced anybody. Once a 
man accepts the Incarnation and goes to work re- 
ligiously upon its basis, this lately highly adver- 
tised stumbling-block to faith soon disappears. 
Postmodernism will not argue much about how 
Jesus came; it will focus its attention upon the 
major fact that He did come, God-made-man. 

2. Postmodernism will frankly admit the pos- 
sibility of miracles, although not in the sense 
which defines miracle as an arbitrary violation of 
natural law. It is unthinkable that the Eternal 
should have made laws for governing creation so 
defective that frequently He is compelled to annul 


56 POSTMODERNISM 


them. It is entirely thinkable, indeed, for the 
scientist it is necessarily true, that much of the 
law governing the cosmos is in toto humanly un- 
known and that much of what is known by man 
is only partially known. That things may happen, 
and do happen occasionally, which apparently 
deny the validity of what have appeared to man to 
be cosmic laws, every experimenting scientist 
knows, particularly those who deal with the less 
probed sciences, if one may use the term, such 
sciences as psychology. That the Eternal can, by 
the operation of laws unknown to man, bring about 
results which would be impossible under the opera- 
tion merely of those laws which we do know, is a 
proposition so soundly logical and so consonant 
with experience as to meet with little opposition 
from intelligent people. What the scientist objects 
to is, first, any maintenance that cosmic laws are 
really breakable; second, the substitution of blind 
dependence upon possible miracle for the deter- 


mined use of one’s own brain and energy. The be- » 


lief that God may cure a cancer, for instance, in 
answer to the prayer of a devout man, by the opera- 
tion of laws governing the constitution of matter 
of which at present man knows next to nothing, is 
not what offends the medical profession. What ir- 
ritates it is that any one should be foolish enough 
so to depend upon such possible miracle as to aban- 
don a determined search for the cancer germ. The 


a 


POSTMODERNISM 57 


modern man believes that when we were given 
brains we were intended to use them and that it is 
blasphemy not to employ them. Postmodernism 
will insist upon the same thing; and will continue 
to believe in miracles just the same. 

3. To the Postmodernist the Incarnation will 
ever continue to be a miracle, the central miracle 
of all, That he understands the processes of the In- 
carnation he will not pretend. That he understands 
God at all, except in terms of the Incarnation, he 
will willingly deny. He will not explain the In- 
carnation but he will believe in it as a fact. He will 
do this not primarily because of the sanction of the 
Bible, although he will continue to give to the 
Gospel narratives the credence that contemporary, 
or nearly contemporary, documents always deserve 
for events alleged to have happened. He will be- 
lieve in the Incarnation chiefly because millions of 
people, of every sort and race and class and culture, 
including many of the most intelligent individuals 
the world has ever known, have taken it as a basis 
upon which to build up the practice of the presence 
of God and have found that it forms a firm and 
satisfactory foundation for the cultivation of such 
love as does really reveal Him. It will seem to the 
Postmodernist highly incredible that flowers of 
such variety and such beauty should have sprung 
from an imaginary seed. The twentieth century 
man is even more fortunate than those to whom 


58 POSTMODERNISM 


Paul preached. They were compelled to accept 
their technic on his authority. We have the addi- 
tional authority of the innumerable souls who have 
found that technic sufficient. 

In depending upon such a sanction Postmodern- 
ism may well maintain that it is not acting un- 
reasonably or doing anything exceptional but that, 
on the contrary, it is merely following, in its at- 
tempt to arrive at religious Truth, the invariable 
procedure of man in approaching every other sort 
of Truth. When a student starts studying Chemis- 
try he is not turned loose, unguided, in a wilder- 
ness of chemicals, test tubes, and Bunsen burners 
and bidden to think things out for himself. He is 
told, not merely certain facts, but also certain en- 
tirely unproved theories about the constitution and 
action of matter,* theories which chemists have 
been led to believe by their experiments as probably 
true. He is then urged himself to deal with various 
chemicals and to see whether or not they do react 
according to the assumed hypotheses. He discovers 
eventually that they seem to do so. No chemist 
ever can demonstrate absolutely the truth of those 

* For instance, he is told of Avogadro’s hypothesis, first 
presented in 1811, that under like conditions equal vol- 
umes of gases contain the same number of molecules. 
There is, it is true, a tendency among chemists nowadays 
to call this hypothesis a “law,” but this is merely for the 
sake of convenience. It has never been proved and would 


seem to be unprovable; yet a very large part of modern 
chemistry is based upon it. 


POSTMODERNISM 59 


hypotheses. But it would be folly to say that 
neither teacher nor student ever comes to know the 
facts involved in Chemistry. Or, it may be, the 
pupil starts studying Geometry. He begins with 
certain unproved theories, usually those promul- 
gated by Euclid. He is told to assume those the- 
ories, as mathematicions have done before him, 
with no proof whatever, and see whether experi- 
ment and reasoning carried on upon their basis 
show them to be useful and satisfactory. Nobody 
ever demonstrates these basic assumptions. Nobody 
can. But it would be ridiculous to say that there- 
fore people never come to know Geometry. In re- 
ligion the novitiate is also given an unprovable as- 
sumption, the Incarnation, an assumption which is 
sane, in that religion without it is unthinkable for 
an intelligent man, but still an assumption. He is 
told that millions of people have accepted it as true 
and that on its basis they have built a satisfactory 
approach to that Reality who can be discovered 
only by love. He is hopelessly out of touch with 
scientific procedure if he refuses to experiment in 
this religious technic until someone can demon- 
strate to him that admittedly undemonstrable 
axiom. 

4. Postmodernism will readily and gladly ac- 
knowledge, what Christianity has always recog- 
nized, that for purposes of worship the Incar- 
nation must needs be extended and continued 


60 POSTMODERNISM 


sacramentally. God is lovable, and through love 
knowable, only in terms of time and space. The 
Postmodernist will know that prevalent human in- 
stincts cannot safely be disregarded. In religion 
one of the most insistent of these instincts is that 
which insists that if God is to be loved He must be 
localized. Every religion has placed its Deity in a 
fixed spot, in imagination at least, for purposes of 
worship—every religion, that is to say, except 
Modernism. Even the older-fashioned Protestant, 
who rejected sacraments as superstitious, found 
that he must localize God somehow. He did it by 
making mental images of Him, in his own likeness, 
either seated in some far-off Heaven or hovering 
about in the immediate air. As for historic Chris- 
tianity, it, from the very beginning, accommodated 
itself to this instinct by the sacramental system. 
Christians believed that Jesus, who is God, local- 
ized Himself in the water of Baptism in order to 
welcome the neophyte and wash away his sin; that 
Jesus localized Himself in the priest who pro- 
nounced forgiveness for wickedness repented of 
and confessed; that Jesus localized Himself in the 
hands of a Bishop to give the gift of the guiding 
Spirit in confirmation and ordination; that Jesus 
localized Himself in bride and groom as they con- 
tracted holy marriage; that Jesus localized His 
healing power in the holy oil; most of all that 
Jesus localized Himself in the sacrament of the 


POSTMODERNISM 61 


altar. As soon as Christianity emerges, an historic 
movement, we find its worship concentrated around 
the Lord’s Supper or, as it came later to be called, 
the Mass. He was there present, to be adored, and 
loved, and prayed to, and received into one’s 
lonely, needy self. Instead of being incarnate in a 
body of flesh, through which flowed blood like 
man’s own blood, He made bread His body, wine 
His blood. At the center of everything Christian 
was the Mass. 

That this meeting of man’s instinctive need is 
as wise and as necessary as the Incarnation itself, 
the Postmodernist, who knows little and cares not 
a jot about those quarrels, and arguments, and mis- 
understandings which made the sixteenth century 
Protestant contend against the sacramental idea, 
will readily and gladly admit. He will no longer 
continue struggling toward a Jesus who is imma- 
terial, ghostly, vague; nor will he try to find God 
merely by remembering Jesus as a God-man once 
entirely human and localized but not any longer 
quite human or localized. He will offer his most 
intimate worship where Christians have always 
found it easiest and best to offer it, to Jesus present 
on His altar. There he will shrive himself and of- 
fer himself; there in the silence he will wait for 
the voice of God to speak to him; there he will 
pray. And if some friend should reproach him for 
worshipping bread and wine, like an idolator, he 


62 POSTMODERNISM 


will be patient with the ignorance and the lack of 
imagination of that friend. 

5. The Postmodernist will not seek to be un- 
pleasantly dogmatic. He will have no desire to 
build up creeds of his own which may be crammed 
down other people’s throats, creeds which deal with 
non-essentials and mere implications of the faith. 
He will be especially impatient of creeds expressed 
in terms of the outworn controversies of the six- 
teenth century. Because he is sane he will know 
that there can be no thinking without creeds, be 
they political creeds, or economic creeds, or scien- 
tific creeds, or religious creeds. He will have his 
creeds: the ancient formula of Nicaea and its 
shorter summary, the so-called Apostles’ Creed. 
These creeds deal with primary, axiomatic things. 
Their chief concern is to assert that the Incarna- 
tion is a fact and that there is a Holy Spirit which 
comes from the Eternal through Jesus, who will 
guide men into all Truth. That this guidance has 
been fully furnished and is no longer to be opera- 
tive will seem to the Postmodernist unreasonable. 
He is content with a basis for his faith. The rest 
will be revealed in due time. 

6. Finally, the Postmodernist will not be an 
ecclesiast. To him the Church will have its only 
meaning as the guardian of the truth of the Incar- 
nation and of the practice of its sacramental exten- 
sion. It will have authority only when it speaks and 


POSTMODERNISM 63 


acts m its capacity of custodian. He will judge its 
words, its missions, its colleges, its cathedrals, all 
that it has, by the faithfulness with which it, 
through them, promulgates this faith and extends 
this practice. He will revere pastors, priests, bish- 
ops, popes, only as the proponents of this faith and 
practice. To him the Church will be admittedly 
divinely commissioned and empowered, but still 
merely an agency and not in itself sacrosanct. The 
Incarnation and the sacraments—these will be to 
him the things which matter. 

As he attempts to state his position, the Post- 
modernist will be met by those who say to him, 
“What you really mean is that you are a Catholic.” 
This will bother him little. Names do not mean 
much to him. Of course he does recognize, even 
now, that his belief and his technic are fundamen- 
tally those of the Catholic Church of the ages. He 
even maintains that he belongs to that Catholic 
Church. The resentments of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the political intrigues of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth, the rationalistic complacencies of the 
nineteenth, even the prejudices of hooded fanatics 
in the twentieth, all of which have bade men trem- 
ble with mingled rage and horror whenever they 
heard the word Catholic, are alike almost meaning- 
less today, at least to educated people. The Post- 
modernist looks with more approval upon Roman 
Catholicism than he does upon current Protes- 


64 POSTMODERNISM 


tantism, for while the latter seems to him chiefly 
a mad babble about nothing, he sees the former 
ministering to the souls of men and bringing them 
sacramentally and humbly to the feet of the In- 
carnate God. He does not commonly find himself, 
however, ready to become a Roman Catholic. He 
sees in that communion, despite of, and marring, 
its effectiveness today a certain uniformity of ex- 
pression, an over-particularity in definition and a 
dogmatic assertiveness and externality in authority, 
all of which strike him as not consonant with the 
philosophy of love upon which, as he understands 
it, Christianity is erected. Indeed these seem to 
him, if he be thoughtful, to be themselves essen- 
tially Protestant errors. He sees, or thinks he does, 
that after the Reformation, and largely because of 
it, there came into things Roman a protective and 
resistive rigidity quite foreign to what had been 
her glorious state before the Reformation. If the 
Council of Trent and the logically resultant Coun- 
cil of the Vatican had never been, if St. Francis 
had not been superceded by St. Ignatius Loyola, 
probably the Postmodernist could be in communion 
with the Holy Father and would be, with much 
joy. As things are, he cannot be. The very language 
in which Rome describes the act necessary to re- 
union is an offence to him. He cannot “make his 
submission.” He cannot think of “making a sub- 
mission” to Jesus or to anything which purports to 


POSTMODERNISM 65 


represent Him. An infallible pope or an infallible 
heirarchy seems to his Postmodernist mind to con- 
tradict the technic of Jesus quite as much as an in- 
fallible book or an appeal to his own supposedly in- 
fallible brain. 

Insofar as he exists at this moment, the Post- 
modernist is apt to be a man without a Church. 
Protestantism, Modernism, and Romanism alike 
seem to him to miss the point. In the Anglican com- 
munion he is more vocal than elsewhere. Usually 
he calls himself there by the name of ‘Anglo-Cath- 
olic” and feels that, although his fellow Church- 
men tolerate him, they neither love him much 
nor try in the least to understand him. They im- 
ply, even when they are too polite to say it, that he 
is too much concerned with ecclesiastical millinery, 
that he is enamored of ritual and sentimentally at- 
tached to Medievalism. He is not. altogether com- 
fortable, either, in his not ill-grounded fear that 
at any moment the Anglican or Episcopal Church 
may throw in its lot with Modernistic Protestant- 
ism and bid him join that company of the senti- 
mentally semi-intellectual. However, his freedom 
to practise the Catholic technic, so far at least, is 
more nearly possible there than elsewhere. Occa- 
sionally, like Dr. Orchard in London, he remains 
affiliated with the Congregationalists or some other 
sort of Protestants, and believes and practises his 
religion despite the burden of humorous pity which 


66 POSTMODERNISM 


his fellow Protestants pour upon him. In every 
communion he is to be found. Even in Rome he is 
not unknown. Wherever he is, he is for the most 
part misunderstood and inarticulate. As yet almost 
unnoticed, he continues his ponderings and his 
prayers, confident that modern thought demands 
him, sure that he is emergent. In this day of dis- 
illusionment he must have great faith and much 
humility. He is not sufficient, and he knows it; but 
as best he can he must make ready. 


ll. THE MORAL REVOLT OF THE 
YOUNGER GENERATION 












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THE MORAL REVOLT OF THE YOUNGER 
GENERATION 


ot long ago I conducted a series of meetings 
N about religious problems in Sprague Hall at 
Yale University. One of the questions put into the 
question box was perhaps more than usually in- 
teresting. It ran, “Ethics means just what is cus- 
tomary. Why should I be a slave to mere conven- 
tion? Is there any good reason why I should not 
maintain a mistress while at Yale, as long as I 
take good care of my health?’ 

This question was somewhat frank, even for a 
modern undergraduate, but is not to be regarded 
as at all a unique query. Our younger people every- 
where, and particularly our more intelligent and 
informed younger people, are inquiring why, after 
all, they should be expected to remain chaste, and 
honest, and truthful, and self-sacrificing. They are 
not particularly ignorant, for the most part, of the 
content of morals. They are demanding something 
more fundamental. They are asking for a rationale 
of morals. And, it might as well be confessed, they 


70 POSTMODERNISM 


are having considerable difficulty in finding one. 
The inner significance of their revolt, real and not 
merely apparent, against established moral regula- 
tions lies in their inability to discover any sane 
reason for obeying them. 

This, of course, deeply distresses all of us; and 
it hopelessly puzzles many. Is it not dreadful that 
these naughty children should revolt against the 
decent ways of society ? In the minds of such per- 
sons as lift shocked hands at these wild girls and 
boys lies commonly the assumption that our moral 
standards are of necessity right with an eternal and 
essential rightness. We fail to perceive that it is 
this very assumption which is being questioned. 
We do not understand that youth will no longer 
respect our standards simply because they are 
ours; that we must devise an apologetic for our 
ethics reasonable enough and strong enough to 
persuade youth that it is necessary and valid. 

That sounds insane to many older people. 
“Tut!” they exclaim, “things have come to a pretty 
pass when our children coming to maturity do not 
recognize that we are wiser than they, when they 
will no longer believe us if we tell them that 
these things are to be done and those things not to 
be done. Is the old authority of parents gone en- 
tirely ?” The answer is that, at least in dealing with 
older adolescence, of course it has. Children will 
obey their elders up to a certain period, but all 


REVOLT OF YOUNGER GENERATION 7\ 


modern educational methods teach them as they 
reach maturity to obey no one who cannot convince 
them.* ‘The typical collegian today—who sets 
the fashion ethically as well as in dress for his or 
her fellows of the same age in every walk of life— 
is taught to examine life fearlessly and follow only 
that which persuades. Such a person naturally is 
amused when the elders say, “This you must do; 
that you must not do; and on our say so.” Such a 
person says, “Show me why I must, or else I jolly 
well won’t.”” And the trouble with us of the slightly 
elder generation is that, instead of telling him why, 
we get angry and sarcastic. Partly we resent his 
demanding to know why; and partly, we do not 
know why ourselves. 

“Ethics,” of course, and “morals” are merely 
two words meaning “those things which are cus- 
tomary.” To an unreconstructed Igorot it is ethical 
to go head-hunting. To most people in early nine- 
teenth century England it was moral to work 
women like horses in mines and to employ babes 
in cotton mills. In the south before the war it was 
commonly considered very immoral to seduce a 
white girl, but quite condonable to seduce a 


*To a large extent this is true teaching. At the same 
time collegians are not being effectively taught that if 
persuasion is to be the method, persuasibility, or at least 
open-mindedness, in youth is prerequisite. It is very diffi- 
eult for youth to be open-minded. 


72 POSTMODERNISM 


negress. There is nothing static about morals. 
Ethics changes with every generation. 

Before anyone will accept the ethical standards 
of any people or period he must have a hearty re- 
spect for those people or that period, and believe 
that their rules serve good and beautiful ends. The 
plain fact is that our younger people have little 
respect for our generation, which has messed up 
industrialism, which produced the ghastly butch- 
ery of the past few years as its highest achieve- 
ment internationally, which has well-nigh killed off 
the arts amid floods of rotogravures, broadcastings, 
and popular priced magazines, which produces few 
leaders in any humanistic field, and which bids 
buoyant youth to emulate and, even more difficult, 
to admire the sombre stupidity of merely com- 
mercial success. If the only authority for our 
ethics is us, we might as well say farewell to our 
children. Is there no deeper authority for conven- 
ional morals than the fact that they are conven- 
tional? There is, of course, but most of us our- 
selves do not know what it is. How can we then 
teach it to our children ? 

The only sane reason for being decent, honest, 
truthful, and the rest is that by keeping under our 
bodies and by refraining from exploiting our fel- 
lows we liberate our possibilities for the spiritual 
life. Except as a preliminary for living close to 
God our ethics is meaningless. Except for the 


REVOLT OF YOUNGER GENERATION 73 


spiritual life and the fact that we should thus make 
it impossible, it were entirely sensible to keep a 
mistress, provided we saw that she and we were 
healthy; sensible to indulge in all sorts of flirtage 
which did not result in physical embarrassments 
and deterioration; sensible to lie, to exploit, to 
luxuriate, to look after number one, as long as we 
kept out of legal difficulties; sensible to believe 
that it is only the law of nature that in free com- 
petition the strongest and the most unscrupulous 
should survive. Christian ethics is built upon two 
principles: first, that the chief end of man is to 
seek after God and to find Him, and second, that 
our physical and social life must be so disciplined 
as to free the soul for this chief activity. Our whole 
moral system of today was originated by those who 
had these two principles firmly in their minds. We 
are to do those things which are conventionally 
right because in so doing we shall put lower 
natures in such a subsidiary place that they will 
not interfere with spirits finding God. That was 
the basis on which conventional morals was built. 
We ought to recognize that without religion as a 
basis our whole ethical structure is lacking in 
necessary sanction. 

Ours is, for the most part, an irreligious but 
fairly moral generation. The fire of spiritual aspi- 
ration which led our fathers to originate and per- 
petuate certain ideas and ideals of right and wrong, 


74 POSTMODERNISM 


we have lost. The power which started the ethical 
wheels to going round has long since been turned 
off in most of us. We kept going, though, by a 
sort of moral inertia, until we hit a big bump. 
That bump was the war. The old ethical machine 
is not revolving now in business, in politics, in 
diplomacy, or in individual life. We must recreate 
the energizing fire, or else expect that a new and 
probably unchristian ethics will arise. 

There is such a new ethics arising, a morality 
based upon a totally different conception of life 
and its values than the Christian or indeed the 
theistic conception. We have not taught our youth 
much about their souls or the possibility of spir- 
itual development; but we have carefully and 
thoroughly impressed upon them the fact that they 
have bodies. We have moreover taught them that 
these highly important bodies, in nature and de- 
sires, are descended from and akin to those of the 
beasts. We have so taught them because this is in- 
dubitably the truth. We have, with much emphasis, 
convinced them that they are a more highly evolved 
sort of animal and have almost wholly failed to 
remind them that they are also something infinitely 
more. Ought we to be surprised that they estimate 
their goods and evils on the merely physical level ? 
Is it to be marvelled at that they cannot see why 
perfectly natural physical impulses should be re- 
strained? Is it inexplicable that to them Mrs. 


REVOLT OF YOUNGER GENERATION 75 


Grundy should appear to have been a somewhat 
demented and decidedly hypocritical old lady, her 
prohibitions survivals of ridiculous taboos ? 

The challenge of youth ought to make us re- 
examine moral standards and revaluate them. The 
very first thing we shall do if we are honest in such 
valuation is to admit that there is nothing Christian 
about restraints in themselves. Jesus’ teaching is 
singularly lacking in *“‘Thou shalt not’s.” For in- 
stance, He seems to have been quite out of sym- 
pathy with the current legalism in regard to im- 
purity. He ate with sinners and was friendly and 
kindly in His dealings with several women of ill- 
fame. His sole recorded utterance about sexual im- 
purity was the statement that to look on a woman 
with desire was as truly adultery as carnally to 
know her. The purpose of that utterance was evi- 
dently to reduce to absurdity the violent treatment 
of every factual manifestation of passion. Robert 
Louis Stevenson uttered the same truth when he 
said that while a man could remain physically 
chaste, no man could or did remain chaste in his 
mind. I find no evidence, in Jesus’ teaching, of 
any special value put by Him on chastity as an 
end in itself. 

Jesus never valued any merely negative virtues. 
He came not that men might deny life, curb and 
thwart impulses, or starve instincts. He came that 
men might have life and have it more abundantly. 


76 POSTMODERNISM 


The distinctive thing about His teaching is that 
He revealed and still reveals life as not merely a 
physical thing but also a spiritual thing. He shows 
to us how men and women may find their chief joy 
in contact and friendship with God. Just as it is 
a spiritual friendship between man and woman 
which transforms among us animal mating into 
human marriage, so Divine friendship lifts our 
whole life from a physical plane into something 
infinitely finer; and just as the regarding of mar- 
ried life merely or predominantly on the physical 
level will kill off the spiritual possibilities of that 
relationship, so undue attention riveted upon any 
mere physical impulses will kill off all spiritual 
delights. 

Of most of this the greater part of our young 
people knows next to nothing. To the joys of 
spiritual aspiration it is quite uninitiated. To it 
man seems a more canny animal. We can persuade 
it to refrain from filling its life with carnal indul- 
gences only by showing it that there are finer 
things wherewith to fill that life. 

To show this is the task of bigger people than 
most of us are. If our slightly elder generation 
consisted of men and women whose lives were filled 
with urbane and lovely spiritual achievement, we 
could do it. That, however, is not the composition 
of our generation. Even the best of us are not good 


REVOLT OF YOUNGER GENERATION 77 


so much as merely not bad. We have emptied our 
lives of evil, it may be, but then we have left them 
empty. Our goodness is not godlike; our decency is 
deadly dull. We ought not to be sorry that our 
children ask for jollier ways than ours. As a matter 
of fact most of us have in truth a sneaking admira- 
tion for the seeking youngsters. They may be wild, 
but at least they are not wooden; naughty, but not 
negative. 

If we are in the least degree wise, we shall stop 
denunciation of youth and set about filling our 
own lives with a little spiritual reality. It is true 
that boys and girls all around us are pitiably 
squandering much of the best of life, living on a 
carnal plane, overvaluing sex, making common that 
which should subserve true love, cutting themselves 
off from the more beautiful joys. We do wish to 
help them. ‘Then let us follow the example of Je- 
sus, who has lifted men to higher life and jov and 
away from mere carnality not by scolding but by 
loving, and because not of what He refrained from 
being but of what He was. 

Dear old Mrs. Grundy, patroness of degenerated 
Puritanism, is dead. Youth wishes to bury her. 
Let us not keep trundling about her increasingly 
unpleasant corpse. Let us join with youth and inter 
her with rejoicing. Then let us take our place by 
youth’s side and adventure forth in search of God, 


78 POSTMODERNISM 


recognizing that in the act of finding Him our 
generation has been conspicuously inept. It may 
be that we can help youth to discover God; it may 
be that we shall prove the ones who need the help. 


Ill, RELIGION IN COLLEGES 










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RELIGION IN COLLEGES 


ECENTLY an ecclesiastic, grown old in honor- 
R able labors, wrote a book. He told his readers 
that, with advancing years, he had come to realize 
that the future depended upon youth, and that it is 
necessary for the Churches to conciliate young men 
and women. Therefore he urged that difficulties in 
religious belief should be tempered to them. For 
instance, he maintained, youth might well be told 
that the Apostles’ Creed, with its definite state- 
ments that Jesus is God, born of a Virgin, resur- 
rected from the dead, might properly be said even 
by one who did not quite acknowledge those state- 
ments to be literally true. It is not here purposed 
to dwell at length upon the curious neologism 
which makes the words “‘I believe” equal to “I ac- 
cept as having an antiquarian interest.” The eccle- 
silastic in question is old and honored for many 
good works and noble words, and it is not gracious 
to complain about his use of the English lan- 
guage. 

It is, however, quite respectful, and perhaps not 
useless, to point out that in this address he uncon- 


82 POSTMODERNISM 


sciously bore testimony to his years. None but one 
who had passed youth could suppose that men 
younger than forty may be won to religion by 
lessening its difficulties or modifying its claims. 
A somewhat varied acquaintance with young men, 
particularly with those young men who may be 
supposed to have the most intellectual difficulties, 
those in our colleges or just graduated from them, 
has led the present writer to the conviction that a 
considerable part of the failure of the Churches to 
hold young people is due exactly to this attempt 
to solve intellectual difficulties by avoiding them 
or minimizing their legitimacy and importance. 
Just as young men are cynical about democracy 
because they are urged, not to solve its difficulties, 
but to accept, in its stead, a compromise with 
plutocracy masquerading under its venerable name, 
so they are frankly bored by a Christianity which 
they perceive is no longer the heartpounding chal- 
lenge to serve a supernatural God-man, a religion 
of necessity super-reasonable as well as superhu- 
manly dynamic, but now hardly more than a phi- 
losophy questionably logical, using ancient words 
and symbols in denatured ways. Old men may be, 
and often are, willing to accept such solutions; but 
not young ones. A young person with stuff in him 
will either accept democracy or reject it at the face 
value of its proper claims; he will not substitute 
a new and easier content and be satisfied because 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES 83 


the name has not been changed. He will accept or 
reject Christianity as a supernatural religion, and 
Christ as a supersensible phenomenon. He will not 
say he believes a creed unless he does believe it. 
The men who are won by emasculating theology 
are of questionable value to a Church which seeks 
to lead men and to establish the Kingdom of God. 

It is not much of an exaggeration, if any, to say 
that only about one-tenth of our undergraduate 
population is both capable of thinking and willing 
to think.* There are today many reasons why men 
go to college, besides the desire to develop the in- 
tellect. Social prestige; the supposed economic 
value of a bachelor’s degree; the desire to acquire 
a profitable professional technique; the hope of 
putting off for a few years the necessity of enter- 
ing upon the grind of productive labor; a vision of 
honors won by athletic prowess; a dream of good 
times, more or less sedate; parental ambition to 
make swans out of ducklings; these are some of the 
reasons why the collegian, before he gets his degree 
and afterwards, is not, for the most part, interested 
in anything requiring mental effort. He thinks 


*This fact complicates collegiate administration, as 
will be easily imagined. Frequently one hears it urged 
that students be given large control over university 
policy. That would be admirable if undergraduates were 
essentially intellectual persons of scholarly ambition, and 
hunger for truth. Unfortunately, in America at least, 
this is not the case. 


84 POSTMODERNISM 


himself clever, but laziness and conceit are fully 
as characteristic of him as are clear thinking or 
high idealism. This is, to be sure, an indictment of 
someone—probably not of the colleges or of their 
students so much as of a social situation quite in- 
dependent of our educational system. 

Whoever is at fault, this fact should not be for- 
gotten in estimating the religious demands of youth 
today. One should remember that the great mass 
of collegians merely reflects the social and religious 
attitudes common in society. ‘The superficiality and 
complacency of these attitudes is plain enough. 
America, as much as any nation, is still content to 
estimate life in material terms. The campus echoes 
this. There is little heart-searching about the mean- 
ing of life. The usual undergraduate is not an im- 
moral person; he has no wicked purposes. He con- 
fidently looks forward to a lifetime spent respect- 
ably in enjoyment of what seems to him harmless 
selfishnesses. He hopes to find his nice little niche in 
a secure social order. He seems unsuspecting of the 
fact that there are forces at work which make this 
career somewhat precarious. He is also unaware 
that to the thoughtful world as a whole, even now, 
not to speak of the past, a satisfactory meaning 
of life is not to be found in these terms. The search 
for extra-worldly contacts, the reality of the im- 
material, he simply thinks nothing about. 

Such persons ask that the Churches bother them 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES 85 


as little as possible. That religion should remain a 
decent appendage to life is their desire. ‘Theolog- 
ical propositions matter little one way or the other. 
Let us be practical, conservative, content. The 
Churches, they think, without any clear reasoning 
about it, are worthy institutions; but the less fuss 
there is about dogma, the better. These are they 
who may respond to the method of approach re- 
ferred to above. It is questionable, however, whe- 
ther they will ever more than nominally respond, 
whether they are material to be recruited in any- 
thing worthy the name of spiritual adventure. It is 
not from such men that those have come who have 
contributed to the spiritual progress of mankind. 
To please them is a high price to pay for alienating 
the minority who are intellectually and morally in 
earnest, who have potential power of spiritual as- 
piration, and who demand of the Churches clear 
reality and unmistakable theological sincerity. 
When one realizes that neologistic compromise 
is not the way to reach this minority, when one de- 
sires to put them in the way of attaining a reason- 
able and honest concept of God and of man’s rela- 
tionship to Him, one finds certain actual diffieul- 
ties. Perhaps some of them may be enumerated. 
The first and probably the most significant diff- 
culty is the ignorance of the undergraduate regard- 
ing the actual content of religious belief. It is next 
to impossible for him to adjust religion to modern 


86 POSTMODERNISM 


science and philosophy, because he does not know 
what that religion is which is to be adjusted. Few 
of those who enter college have such knowledge 
when they come and, almost unaccountably when 
one remembers the importance of religion in the 
life of the race, they are rarely given an oppor- 
tunity to learn it after they are matriculated.* 
Usually only the vaguest religious ideas are found 
in the undergraduate, and these more emotional 
than intellectual. One finds spiritual inclinations 
and sentiments, rather than beliefs. The majority 
have received no systematic body of faith at all; 
and even the minority have rarely more than vague 
remembrances of things hastily crammed before 
they joined the Church or were confirmed. In this 
respect those who have come from Church prepara- 
tory-schools are little, if any, better off than the 
rest. A few Bible stories they remember, and some 
ethical principles more or less Christian, and not 
much else. 

Obviously, if these men are to be assisted in ar- 
riving at vital religious convictions, they must first 
know what has been believed and why. To develop 

* Almost every college has “courses in religion”; but 
these consist for the most part, as examination of cata- 
logues will show, of literary studies of the Bible. The- 
ology, ecclesiology, and liturgics—the intellectual con- 
tent of religious belief and practice—seem to be as 
unknown as necromancy and astrology. Religious instruc- 


tion in our halls of higher learning is mostly mush and 
milk. 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES 87 


a scientific attitude with no study of the physical 
investigations of the past, would be to use an ab- 
surdly wasteful method. To formulate a philosophy 
with disregard for all the speculations that men 
have made in former days, would be an absurd en- 
deavor. It is equally difficult to work out a religion 
for today without giving due weight to the in- 
numerable spiritual experiments of our fathers. 
Yet it is just this impossible achievement which we 
are asking of modern youth. My own college not 
long ago instituted a required course in religion 
for freshmen, in which the basic concepts of re- 
ligions in general, and then the particular beliefs 
of Jews and Christians, were treated as objectively 
and as impartially as any other kind of knowledge. 
The professor in charge found, in his first session 
with the class, that not one member knew that in 
all religions the sense of sin and the demand for 
sacrifice were fundamental, or that both morality 
and spiritual aspiration had been built on these 
foundations; nor did anyone know that the priest 
had always been the forerunner of the prophet. Yet 
these are truisms to the student of religions. Less 
than one-fourth knew what has been the Christian 
doctrine of the Incarnation, although all Christian 
theology and a considerable amount of Christian 
history have depended upon that belief. But per- 
haps the most significant fact in connection with 
this course was the discovery that other colleges re- 


88 POSTMODERNISM 


garded it as a strange and remarkable innovation. 

A second difficulty, and one that powerfully af- 
fects thinking undergraduates, is the apparent fail- 
ure of the Churches to deal either bravely or intel- 
ligently with social and international problems. 
They know that to divorce religion from utterance 
concerning business and politics is to deny its au- 
thority over life and to relegate it to the realm of 
things incidental. They believe that while the 
sundering of Church and State is necessary, it 
does not follow that the Church may rightly for- 
sake its critical examination of statecraft. They are 
convinced that such an abandonment has taken 
place. They see little or no evidence that organized 
Christianity is seriously attempting to demand in- 
ternational peace or political justice. To them the 
war and its aftermath have shown the Churches 
willing to become the tools of clever and Machiavel- 
lian politicians. When they perceive that in emer- 
gencies the Churches have been, ready to forget, 
and even to deny, the wisdom of Him whom they 
profess to acknowledge as God, they doubt the 
reality of ecclesiastical professions. Similarly, 
they think that the Churches are apathetic towards 
social maladjustments and barely tolerant of those 
within the ranks who are trying to explain the eco- 
nomic implication of divine teaching. They have 
learned that civilization based on self-seeking is 
apparently dying, and it seems to them that the 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES 89 


Churches perceive neither the gravity of the dis- 
ease nor the necessity of cure. Rightly or wrongly, 
they find in this failure of perception evidence 
either of the venality of religious leaders or of an 
almost incredible stupidity; and when they are 
asked to accept the spiritual guidance of those 
whom they deem either knaves or fools it is not 
surprising that they show neither respect nor pa- 
tience. There seems little likelihood of winning in- 
telligent young people to the Churches, and to the 
spiritual truths committed to them, unless the 
Churches, both in their official utterances and in 
the personnel of those who work for them among 
students, can show at least as much social intelli- 
gence and social conscience as the undergraduates 
themselves possess. 

Another thing that stands between the students 
and the Churches is the present widespread con- 
troversy between Fundamentalism and Liberalism. 
This division within the Protestant ecclesiastical 
bodies is not, to be sure, over the content of belief, 
but rather over a less important subject, the nature 
of the Bible. Thanks, however, to that quite general 
ignorance of dogma of which mention has been 
made, this distinction is not clear to our collegians. 
It is not even clear to more mature people. If it 
were, a prominent ecclesiastic, when he protested 
not long ago that, if a priest denied the deity of 
Christ, he did not belong in a communion which 


90 POSTMODERNISM 


believed in that deity, would not have been 
promptly classed with those Fundamentalists who 
insist that the Bible is a geological and biological 
textbook and that the theory of evolution is 
anathema. 

Thinking students are overwhelmingly against 
the Fundamentalists. They are driven to that posi- 
tion by the inexorable compulsion of facts. It is 
unfortunate that the notion should be generally 
abroad that all who believe in the Nicene Creed 
hold to a discredited view of the nature of Scrip- 
ture, that Christianity stands or falls with an atti- 
tude toward the Bible that is very far from ecu- 
menical. Those who seek to discredit all religion 
have been quick to take advantage of this confusion 
in the mind of the student and the Churches have 
done little to clear it away. Even the non-Protes- 
tant bodies are suffering from this current contro- 
versy, for which they are not responsible and in 
which they have almost no share. Few sane stu- 
dents will seek religious guidance from those who 
appear to be afraid of modern criticism and im- 
partial scientific study. There is great need that 
the Churches should make clear the difference be- 
tween questions of dogma and questions of mere 
Biblical interpretation. Religion, after all, finds its 
real sanctions not in books, but in the spiritual ex- 
periments of human souls through the ages on the 
basis of revealed or supposedly revealed truths. As 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES 91 


Mr. Chesterton has somewhere said, tradition 
means extending the vote to one’s ancestors. Dogma 
is merely the synthesis of experience. Christianity 
did its most conspicuous work in the first three cen- 
turies, when it had no official Bible to which to ap- 
peal, and its most solid work in the thirteenth 
century, when the Bible was very little read. 
Christianity does not stand or fall by whether the 
account of creation in Genesis is history or folk- 
lore, by whether or not Moses wrote the Penta- 
teuch or St. John the Gospel which bears his name. 

One may also believe that the Church’s failure to 
interest students in religion is partly due to its 
emphasis upon activities. Youth is little impressed 
by drives, campaigns, and the other paraphernalia 
commonly used for promoting ecclesiastical bodies. 
Such projects have a necessary place in religious 
life, although the manner of their presentation is 
not often as spiritual as it might be. They exist, 
however, for those already interested and can 
scarcely be esteemed instruments of evangelization. 
The student is best approached with religion pre- 
sented not as a program, but rather as a power. He 
responds to explanation more readily than to un- 
explained application. He wishes to know before 
he is asked to do. Many doubt this. They say, truly, 
that we procured the interest of men during the 
war by presenting to them a job to be done for 
their country. Why, they ask, is that not the proper 


92 POSTMODERNISM 


method to use in interesting them in spiritual 
things? Such persons forget that those who re- 
sponded in the interest of patriotism had, before 
they were approached, a fairly clear understanding 
of what their country was and a sincere belief in 
it. Precisely what they do not have in religion is 
a reasonable understanding of what God is, and 
an honest belief in Him. This results in Christian 
programs failing to attract. The challenge to youth, 
because of this uncertain faith, is not sufficient to 
compel response. The call of God, as one who de- 
mands much or nothing, means little to him who 
has no conception of God. Christian programs, if 
it is merely a human Church which is asking, seem 
too difficult; if it is a deity who is asking, they 
seem commonly too trivial. At any rate, it is quite 
certain that the average student must know God, at 
least a little bit, before he will consent, even a little 
bit, to carry out a program. 

Finally, one may perhaps venture a word about 
college chapels. Discontent with them is the rule, 
especially when attendance is compulsory. Obser- 
vation will convince any impartial observer that 
the restiveness is due not so much to irreligion in 
the students as to irreligion in the services them- 
selves. Most of them involve a great deal of preach- 
ing and lecturing and very little of devotion.* 


* It is almost unbelievable how stupid most collegiate 
chapel exercises are: held early in the morning on 


RELIGION IN COLLEGES w 


Moreover, those who preach, commonly eminent 
clergymen quite out of touch with student life, seem 
frequently possessed of all the errors of approach 
which this paper is written to suggest. In addition, 
they too greatly substitute ethical for religious sub- 
jects. They seem woefully afraid to talk about God. 
Many of them also grossly over-estimate the worth 
of their auditors. One hears them assuring student 
congregations that the world is waiting for the un- 
dergraduates to save it and they assume, as needing 
no argument, that the students are important 
enough, intelligent enough, and spiritually vital 
enough automatically to contribute more than the 
older generation can contribute; all of which the 
auditors instinctively know is untrue. More than 
occasionally the mistake is made, also, of assuming 
that the undergraduate is impatient of spiritual 
instruction. This is far from the case. The earnest 
collegian wishes to be directed, with affection and 
understanding; and direction is what he almost 
never gets from the pulpit. So generally ineffective 
is college preaching that frequently thoughtful 
students have suggested to me the advisability of 
its abolition and the giving over of chapel time to 
devotions. This is probably too drastic a remedy, 
weekdays “to get the students out of bed’; commonly 
conducted in turn by perfunctory professors, men with 
no training in worship; disfigured by ‘announcements’ ; 


dull, ugly. It is an evidence of decent reverence to revolt 
from such an unnecessary travesty of worship. 


' 94 POSTMODERNISM 


since all the religious information now given in 
most colleges is confined to the sermon. A little is 
better than none. Certainly it would seem that the 
devotional side of chapel exercises might be made 
as dignified, as beautiful, and as reverent as pos- 
sible, and that preachers might well be selected, 
less for their forensic reputations, and more for 
their understanding of student psychology and 
needs. . 

More serious than any particular fault in our 
handling of the undergraduate religious task is the 
general attitude of carelessness and inertia toward 
the whole problem exhibited by most collegiate ad- 
ministrators and faculties. Imagination, daring, 
and sound psychology alike seem lacking. By the 
present opportunist methods, and by willingness to 
surrender to the desires of those easy-going per- 
sons who prefer to dodge a problem rather than to 
think it out, incalculable harm is being done in 
colleges to the religion of America. 


IV. THE CHURCH AND THE 
YOUNG MAN 









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THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN * 


test let me say why I dare to make the sweep- 
Ee, statements which follow. They are not con- 
clusions evolved from preconceptions. Some of 
them go dead against my former notions. Nor are 
they the patter of one who has gone hither and yon 
on preaching trips through camps, or spent six 
months as an overworked, overworried, and over- 
abused Y secretary. They are the cool, calm syn- 
thesis of some thousands of careful observations 
of men. 

For eighteen months during the late war I 
acted as civilian aide to the Senior Chaplain at 
Great Lakes Naval Training Station. I superin- 
tended all chaplains’ work in “Detention,” where 
the men spent the first three weeks of their stay. 
I took a religion registration of nearly every man 
who came in. How many there were, I do not know 
exactly ; but my records show that I gave the chap- 
lains’ instruction on religion and morals two hun- 


* This article, written as I came out of service at Great 
Lakes Naval Training Station, is here included because 
it seems to me as valid now, after seven years of work 
with college men, as it did then. 


98 POSTMODERNISM 


dred and forty-seven times to groups composed of 
eighty-one thousand men. Almost all of these who 
were of my own communion were looked up by 
myself or my assistants. Several other communions 
looked up their men, too. Card-records of over 
four thousand men are available, all Episcopalians ; 
and conversations with other pastors and chaplains 
have given me the results of work done by them 
among the men of eight other communions, Cath- 
olic and Protestant. It is safe to say that the ob- 
servations leading to the following conclusions 
covered at least twenty thousand individual men, 
studied one by one by nine clergymen of various 
faiths. 

Now that the source of evidence has been re- 
vealed, it is possible to state seven things upon 
which the vast majority of those with whom we 
talked seem to have been in essential agreement. 


I 


Most modern American young men care little 
or nothing about organized religion. They are not 
anti-religious. They render to the Churches a for- 
mal respect. Only two per cent who entered the 
station denied a preference for some Church or 
other. For the most part, however, this connection 
had been purely nominal. Religion as a real mo- 
tive-power, it is safe to say, is unknown to at least 
eighty per cent of them. Spirituality as presented 


THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN 99 


by the Churches has impressed them as not mat- 
tering much. With a majority of them church- 
going is a thing done almost solely for family rea- 
sons, or, in smaller places, for social reasons. In 
many little Western towns the church is the only 
rallying-place for young people. Many fellows go 
because they want girls, not because they seek God. 
When they leave home, they naturally stop going. 
Despite all the Sunday schools, young people’s so- 
cieties, clubs, guilds, parish-houses, and the rest, 
the Churches ought to recognize that they have 
never gained the interest and the enthusiasm of 
eight out of ten of the generation just coming to 
maturity. As far as vital motivations go, these fel- 
lows are not Christians at all, but merely more or 
less decent young pagans. 


II 


Most of the men themselves are none too proud 
of their irreligion. After work in camp one realizes 
as never before that “man is an incurably religious 
animal.” When asked why the Churches have 
failed to touch them, they are, naturally, for the 
most part at a loss. Few of them have thought 
much about it. They try hard to put it into words, 
however, glad to find parsons who admit that pos- 
sibly all is not well in Zion. They are very frank, 
yet kind enough withal. 

Jt is interesting to note what are some of the 


100 POSTMODERNISM 


things which they do not mention as alienating 
young men. Rarely does one hear that the ancient 
creeds are difficult to believe. Apparently the 
healthy, simple man in the street shares little of 
the intellectual doubtings of the musty browser 
among books. Few cite the selfish inadequacy of a 
faith which bids men save themselves from hell. 
That quaint and fearsome Calvinistic motive, so 
bothersome to Mr. Wells and Judge Lindsay, has, 
apparently, save in a few rural neighborhoods of 
the Southwest, never been presented to most 
young men of this generation. The disunity of 
Christendom bothers almost no one. Partly with 
regret it must be said that apparently the need for 
a reunited Church is felt at present chiefly by the 
clergy. 

Most of these young men had no fault whatever 
to find with the Churches as such. All their criti- 
cism was leveled at Church members. ‘They had a 
notion that they did rather like Christianity— 
little as they know of it. They were sure that they 
did not like Christians at all. Their feeling came 
to this in most cases—that, if Christian people 
would only endeavor to be Christians, the ordi- 
nary young fellow would like nothing better than 
to come along and try it with them; and that, if 
Christians wanted them to be interested, those 
Christians might well stop criticizing the Church 
and start criticizing themselves. 


THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN 101 


III 

The men believe that those who have the 
Church’s teaching in hand are largely to be blamed, 
in that the instruction given, both from the pulpit 
and in classes, is either over the head of the average 
man, or hazy and indefinite, or both. People justi- 
fiably desire a religion the basic principles of 
which they can clearly comprehend. 

In this respect the ordinary Sunday school seems 
quite to have failed. It has imparted a certain 
number of disconnected Biblical stories, more or 
less interesting, about people long dead, and a few 
moral maxims; but most boys seem to pass through 
it with little knowledge gained of who or what 
God is, of how to get power from Him, of how 
and why to worship Him. Part of this is no doubt 
due to inadequate teachers; but much of it can be 
laid to the modern tendency to substitute ethical 
culture for religion, which bewilders and bemuses 
the ordinary man. 

This same tendency, combined with clerical 
overestimate of the intellectual complexity of the 
man in the street and clerical thinking in terms 
of abstract ideals rather than in those of personal 
relationships, seems to be the explanation of a com- 
mon resentment at sermons. Men hate them, not 
because they are uninterested in God, but rather 
because most sermons tell them nothing much 


definitely about God. 


102 POSTMODERNISM 


The Christian religion is not at all a difficult 
and complex thing, requiring great intellectual 
gifts for its comprehension. The Apostles were un- 
lettered and untraveled men. Most of the saints 
have been quite simple folk. It must be, then, if 
men to-day so generally find it hard to discover 
what Christianity is, that the preachers are not 
good preachers and the teachers are poor teachers. 

After much talk with the men, the following 
simple line of thought was propounded to a Ro- 
man Catholic priest and to Methodist, Lutheran, 
Presbyterian, Baptist, Disciples, and Episcopalian 
clergy, all at Great Lakes, and inquiry made as to 
whether in their judgment it was a correct expres- 
sion of the essence of Christianity: 

“Man grows great by sacrifice willingly under- 
taken, and small by selfish acquisitiveness. To suc- 
ceed, a man must become an unselfish sacrificer. 
To live a sacrificing life is difficult, since it re- 
quires power to control a body inherited from the 
beasts and full of selfish impulses, and also an 
ability to tell the canny, cautious, compromising 
world that its wisdom is folly. In fact, this is so 
hard to do that the ordinary man cannot accom- 
plish it unless he is conscious of God, the Great 
Heart of Things, back of him, with him all the 
way. To know and feel God is necessary for moral 
achievement, at least with most men. Some excep- 
tional people get this contact with Deity by a sort 


THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN 103 


of subjective mysticism; but most men find this 
normally impossible. God, therefore, knowing that 
man must have a Deity expressed in those human 
terms which alone are comprehensible to him, be- 
came man. Jesus Christ is God, the only God that 
can be real to most people. In the light of Him and 
through Him, alone, are the eternal Creator, called 
the Father, and the mystical God who speaks 
within human hearts, called the Holy Spirit, un- 
derstandable and knowable. The Father, the Christ, 
and the Spirit are One God, and the point of con- 
tact is the Christ, met in prayer and sacraments.” 

The various ministers consulted all agreed that 
this was, in very essence, the Christian religion. 
Admitting that it is, why have the great mass of 
young men never grasped it? Apparently our 
teachers are to blame, in that they have beclouded 
the simple faith in mazes of intellectual liberalism 
and oceans of words. If we are not to continue to 
lose young men, we must return to the teaching, 
im concrete definite terms, of the essence of Chris- 
tianity. 


IV 


‘There is among the men a widespread resent- 
ment of sentimentality in worship and ‘“‘the cult 
of the pretty-pretty.” It is hard, but not impos- 
sible, to get particulars. To put it in somewhat 
more philosophic terms than they use, it would 


104 POSTMODERNISM 


seem that they condemn contemporary worship on 
two grounds: first, that it is vicarious; second, that 
it is introspective. 

They do not like choirs, complicated canticles, 
elaborate anthems, or sweet solos. Though they 
may do it badly, they like to sing their own praises 
to the Most High. The minister does too much, 
also, and they themselves too little. They miss the 
corporate note in devotion. 

Since they are healthy-minded young things, 
they resent having their spiritual attention turned 
inward. Their interests are in things outside them- 
selves. The God they want is a friendly Deity from 
Somewhere Else, who comes to meet and help 
them. The immanence of God is not to them so 
helpful a truth as his transcendence combined 
with his willingness to meet them. This is probably 
the reason why the men in service, Protestant as 
well as Catholic, loved the Holy Communion, and 
wanted it. However they might explain it, they felt 
that it is one act of worship where God comes from 
Out There to strengthen, and be reverenced by, 
men Down Here. 

The externalizing of God and the congregation- 
alizing of devotion seem to be the best ways of 
desentimentalizing worship and fitting it to the 
desire of young men for virility in the services of 
our Churches. 


THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN 105 


iv 


Lack of friendly fellowship in the Churches is 
another great difficulty. The men feel that many 
congregations are maintaining religious clubs for 
their own pleasure, instead of houses of prayer to 
God and places of spiritual inspiration to all men. 
These clubs are of two sorts, equally to be avoided. 
One variety gives the chance visitor the impression 
that the people who belong to it resent his coming 
in without first giving them the chance to “black- 
ball” him if they desire. The other sort is so 
anxious for more members that it effusively canon- 
izes him the instant he enters the door. When he 
goes to church, he would like to have people make 
him feel that, as a child of God, the place is his to 
use—that he is already a member of the congrega- 
tion simply by virtue of his desire for worship and 
instruction. Of course, he does not like rented sit- 
tings. They are to him patent evidences of the club 
idea. He misses that casual, quiet friendliness 
which he instinctively feels is what Jesus Himself 
really stands for. He wishes that with God’s peo- 
ple, as with God, there were less respect of persons 
in God’s House. 


VI 
Probably the most difficult criticism to meet is 


that professing Christian people are not really in 
earnest in their desire personally to imitate Jesus. 


106 POSTMODERNISM 


It seems to many men, and those the most worth 
while, that the moral standards of Church people 
are too low. Not that men desire more negative 
morality, more “Thou shalt nots.” Far from that! 
It is positive morality that seems to them defec- 
tive. Christians do not strike them as conspicu- 
ously more kind, more charitable, more loving, and 
more sacrificing than other men and women—par- 
ticularly, more sacrificing. They see prominent 
Church people quite content to live in luxury, to 
enjoy the good things of the earth, earthy, even, 
while thousands of well-meaning, honest, hard- 
working men, women, and children have too little 
carefully and cannily to take thought for the things 
of to-morrow. 

Clergy as well as laity seem to them equally 
guilty. That a minister should live at ease while 
his neighboring fellow minister half starves seems 
strange to them. That a clergyman should ask and 
get six weeks or more in which to play in the sum- 
mer does not to them seem an evidence of zeal for 
souls. They find ‘“gentlemen-parsons” somehow in- 
congruous with the worship of a penniless Christ. 

Of course, a good deal of this criticism of min- 
isters and people is harsh, cruel, unjust. Most of 
it, however, is honest and ineradicable. 

No one thing, save simple teaching, 1s so neces- 
sary for the holding of young men to Christianty 
as the revival, in very real, apparent, and concrete 


THE CHURCH AND THE YOUNG MAN 107 


terms, in the twentieth century, on the spirit of 
Franciscanism. 


VII 


Last, but not least, young men wonder why it is 
that Christian people are unwilling to tell to oth- 
ers the strength and joy that there is in their faith. 
Does one who finds a new brand of very good 
cigars at the canteen keep the discovery to him- 
self? On the contrary, he gladly commends the 
brand to his comrades. If he sees a good show while 
on liberty, he passes the word along. If indeed 
Christians have discovered the greatest thing in 
life, a faith which makes God real and kind and 
near and human and helpful, which makes, with 
power from Him, weak men strong to attain to 
real manhood instead of mere educated beastliness, 
how can they keep quiet about it? To professing 
Christians their reticence may seem an evidence of 
reverence. To the man in the street it signifies 
merely disbelief. 


Such are the charges leveled at Church people 
by actual young men. Some of them were college 
men. Others could scarcely more than write their 
names. They came from every profession and 
trade—and from none. Most of them were from 
seventeen to twenty-five years of age. Some were 
from great cities, some from small towns, some 


108 POSTMODERNISM 


from villages, some from farms. They were a 
cross-section of American civilian young manhood. 

They were not irreligious. They were pathet- 
ically ready for spiritual leadership. They threw 
no bitter slurs at the faith that has made saints 
and heroes of men like them in the ages past. One 
could not help but feel that many of them might 
become simple and happy Christian men, and that 
their younger brothers might never drift away at 
all, if only Christians might with penitence re- 
consecrate themselves, clergymen and people, to 
definite preaching of the fundamental faith, so- 
cial worship of an objective Jesus, quiet fellow- 
ship in devotion, humble seeking to live a Christ- 
like life, and unaffected utterance of the faith that 
is in them. 


V. VICTORIAN ETHICS AND 
RELIGION TODAY 









AN ORG AS Ay Caen 










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VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 
TODAY 


HE most difficult task before you,” said the 

officers of a Christian association in a certain 
university to a clergyman who was about to con- 
duct a series of conferences on the campus, “‘is not 
so much getting students to give allegiance to Je 
sus Christ as the persuading them that Christians 
ought to associate themselves with the Church.” 
This information might have been given with equal 
pertinence in almost any collegiate center. It is 
not unreasonable or exaggerated to say that one of 
the chief hindrances to the promotion of Chris- 
tianity among young people of intelligence is the 
definite distaste they have for certain ecclesiastical 
attitudes of mind. It is a mistake to suppose that 
the incoming generation is irreligious. It is wrong 
to think that generation unable to believe essential 
Christian teachings. There is difficulty in persuad- 
ing it that Christianity may be compelling even 
though the Church be unenticing. 

It is unfortunate for everyone concerned that 


112 POSTMODERNISM 


this should be so and the difficulty should be made 
as temporary as possible. Organized Christian 
bodies must be asking themselves what it is in them 
and in their methods which repels from the Deity 
these highly important young people whom they 
are seeking to interest in Him. It is the duty of 
everyone who studies youths and loves God to sug- 
gest what seem to him unfortunate attitudes in 
ecclesiastical psychology. After five years of almost 
constant work with undergraduates in many col- 
leges, one has a memory crowded with impressions 
secured from personal interviews and from obser- 
vation of undergraduate reactions to sermons 
preached and heard in college chapels and to ef- 
forts made to reach men and women. These im- 
pressions have integrated into certain beliefs. Chief 
among these is a conviction that it is largely the 
survival of two ethical attitudes in the Churches 
which serves to repel young people from them and 
from their message. 

Most of the ecclesiastical bodies that work in 
America, particularly non-Roman America, took 
their present form and adopted their current meth- 
ods under English influences in the nineteenth 
century. Even the Episcopal Church, daughter of 
the Church of England, although it boasts an an- 
cient lineage and possesses a fixed polity at least 
three hundred years old, is really, in its present 
attitudes, the facture of the last century. It is not 


VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 113 


hard to understand how these Churches have re- 
tained, to their own great hurt, certain Victorian 
ethical postures which more intelligent people have 
nowadays, for the greater part, abandoned. 

The basic conviction of the Victorian mind was 
that life is a fixed, static, essentially completed 
thing. Of course there were exceptional Victorians, 
men and women who did have a dynamic concept 
of the universe; but they were exceptions and were, 
as a rule, regarded as persons of loose intelligence 
and suspected morals. To the Victorian, law was 
law, immutable, rigid. To him the only difference 
between Rome of the Caesars or Europe of the 
Middle Ages, on the one hand, and his own im- 
perial England on the other, was that they had dis- 
obeyed the eternal ethical regulations and had 
perished while Britain was obeying and therefore 
enjoying God-given prosperity. “As it was in the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be” applied not 
merely to the Eternal Himself but, in the most 
minute particulars, to everything mundane as well. 
Mr. G. K. Chesterton has lately remarked the 
extraordinary failure of Victorians to realize that 
industrial society had evolved and was evolving 
and that their Capitalism had appeared in this long 
growth as a comparatively modern and untried ex- 
periment. They assumed that since Capitalism was 
in their day, it had always been and always would 
be. This is not an isolated phenomenon but a 


114 POSTMODERNISM 


symptom of a universal misconception about life. 
The middle classes, who controlled all thought, 
were so pleased with themselves, with their semi- 
detached villas at home and with their commercial 
empire abroad, that they came to regard these good 
things as the everlasting will of the Heavenly Con- 
troller of the Universe. They forgot what the 
civilization of their fathers had been and what the 
moral principles of the past had been and they 
ignored utterly that their children might in their 
turn produce something in both of these respects 
quite different. They who assumed stability in 
every particular of their civilization naturally as- 
sumed the essential validity of the morals and man- 
ners which grew out of and expressed that civiliza- 
tion. 

Most of the English Churches during the nine- 
teenth century were controlled by middle-class 
persons utterly possessed by this current, unevolu- 
tionary conceit. In America organized religion was 
in the hands of those not at all unlike their eccle- 
siastical cousins overseas. For good or evil, America 
in the nineteenth century is intellectually remark- 
able chiefly for its facility in imitating the English 
whom she patriotically pretended to despise. In 
both countries, during this long century, while the 
formal doctrines and the written polities of the 
Churches changed very little, there were fostered 
certain ways of thinking, not derivative from or 


VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 115 


dependent upon professed creeds, which colored the 
whole ethical approach. It is these mental atti- 
tudes, unwritten but real, which today repel a gen- 
eration which no longer thinks of life as fixed and 
stable but as evolutionary and dynamic, which is 
sure that Victorian civilization is a thing to which 
man can never return and will never wish to re- 
turn, and which finds Victorian ethical pre-suppo- 
sitions unfitted to the life it is called upon to 
lead. 

There were two of these pre-suppositions which 
today seem especially irritating. 

First, there was the assumption that moral 
codes are by very necessity unchangeable. ‘There is, 
to be sure, an invariant ethical principle to which 
every Christian must give allegiance if he be a 
Christian at all, a principle definitely preached by 
Jesus and dramatized by His cross—that men 
grow great by sacrifice for God and brethren, and 
small by self-seeking. The Victorian went much 
further than that. Even in minute particulars his 
code of Christian morals and manners was im- 
mutable. Only rarely was there an independent 
mind which could see how varied were the ac- 
tual sources of that code: partly Mosaic, partly 
Pauline, partly Teutonic, partly neoclassical, partly 
due to the necessities of the steam engine, partly 
Calvinist, partly Catholic. To most people it was 
one single code, forever unchangeable and un- 


116 POSTMODERNISM 


changing. To say to a good Christian of 1875 that, 
for example, at one time it might be good Chris- 
tianity to put out one’s money on interest and at 
another time it might be mortal sin so to do, would 
have seemed to him somehow to involve a denial 
of the majesty of God. That what is good and 
proper now may be not only improper but definitely 
evil a hundred years from now, would have seemed 
a statement not only blasphemous but insane. 
There could be no evolution of Christian ethics 
conceivable by a generation which ignored the pos- 
sibility of any evolution at all. The jot and tittle of 
the law was to the Victorian as the Sabbath had 
been to the Pharisees, the master of men rather 
than their servant. 

Our young people may, as is often claimed, not 
learn very much in our colleges, but they do for 
the most part get at least the idea that ethical 
standards are greatly influenced by changing eco- 
nomic and social necessities; that particular ap- 
plications of Christ’s general law of love have 
changed, are growing, and certainly will continue 
to develop. They resent any assumption on the part 
of the Churches that if one is to be a Christian one 
must behave like a Victorian. They know that John 
Chrysostom was a Christian, even though he would 
have been sent to a hospital for insane anarchists 
had he lived in the nineteenth century London or 
New York; that Francis of Assisi was a Christian, 


VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 117 


although he would have seemed both criminally im- 
provident and desperately lazy to Samuel Smiles; 
that Jesus of Nazareth was a Christian, despite the 
fact that He denied the validity of militant patri- 
otism. When once our youths learn what is Christ’s 
real ethical attitude; when they find Him seeking 
to produce character not by rule or by scolding but 
by love; when they hear Him stress positive rather 
than negative virtues; when they find that to Him 
a denial of sensual lures is of no value except as 
an initial step in the pursuit of more real satisfac- 
tions—they find all that attractive and sane. Paul’s 
law of responsibility in hberty seems to them mod- 
ern and fresh. But much of the ethics conven- 
tionally preached, the insistence upon the value of 
giving things up, the ridiculous exaggerations of 
alcoholic prohibitionists, the confusion of conven- 
tionality with virtue, the maintenance of nine- 
teenth century behavior as a sine qua non, they 
find musty, stale, and extraordinarily unintelli- 
gent. 

The second mistake in the realm of ethics which 
our Churches have inherited from their Victorian 
fathers is the forgetting that individual moral char- 
acter is an achievement to be attained by gradual 
and painful growth. Consistent with the whole 
nineteenth century concept of life as static was 
the notion of moral character found instanter. 
That one can develop morally only by a series of 


118 POSTMODERNISM 


personal experimentations, in which failures be- 
come the foundations of success, our Anglo-Ameri- 
can grandfathers found it easy to forget. They not 
only failed to see that all adults are children; they 
even hated to regard children themselves as chil- 
dren. The heroes of their moral tales for young- 
sters, little Rollo and his merry fellows of both 
sexes, were not children; they were “little men 
and women.” Human beings were actually re- 
garded in those days as capable of reaching ma- 
turity. If they behaved like children, if they made 
silly mistakes and were sorry and so learned bet- 
ter, they were wicked people. Two effects followed. 
In the first place, men and women were encouraged 
to judge their neighbors, not as struggling folk to 
be allowed for but according to whether or not 
they fully met the requirements of all moral stand- 
ards. In the second place, they became so afraid of 
the cruel judgments of their fellow men that they 
not only ceased to acknowledge their faults but 
also developed a moral pretense quite beyond the 
achievement of any people in history. It became a 
necessary virtue to appear to be better than one 
really was. Not many got to the point of declaring 
that they could not sin; but it was almost a point 
of honor to insist that one did not sin. Always 
one acknowledged in the services of the Churches 
that one was indeed a miserable sinner, but this 
was a general statement; in particulars one was, of 


VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 119 


course, impeccable. One attained moral maturity 
instantly, like the nascent Minerva. . 

This lack of childlikeness, without which one 
may not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, was 
due to the Victorian’s having forgotten Heaven. 
He was wont to sing many hymns about that land 
beyond the grave. He would have been astonished 
to learn that anyone suspected in him a lack of 
supramundane interest. Nevertheless, he rarely had 
any vital conception of a state of life where alone 
there could come to mystical fruition that in hu- 
man character for which one here on earth strove, 
and strove in vain. He would have nothing of the 
ancient doctrines of post-mortem purgation and 
growth preliminary to celestial achievement; he 
felt no need of such doctrines. Straight from earth 
to contemplation of the Beatific Vision he was sure 
that conventionally proper persons went at death, 
and found it no soul-shaking change at that. 

In short, the Victorian made one fatal mistake 
when he thought of his age as ethically full-grown ; 
another mistake when he supposed himself morally 
educated instead of educatable. 

To those who made these mistakes the ancient 
cultural methods for developing character meant 
little or nothing. Alms-giving they systematized 
and regarded from a utilitarian point of view; 
fasting was considered an antiquarian habit; 
prayer became egocentric, almost wholly petition; 


120 POSTMODERNISM 


sacramental penance was thought positively im- 
moral. All one needed to do in order to be good was 
to will to be good and to conceal any possible short- 
comings, as far as one could do so, not merely from 
others but from one’s own self. The very word 
“casuistry” fell into ill repute. It means, properly, 
the fine art of applying general ethical principles 
to individual souls which are struggling to attain, 
little by little, to the standards they know to be 
worthy. The Victorian degraded this good word 
and made it mean a dishonest attempt to avoid 
moral obligations by hair-splitting. What else could 
it mean to an age convinced of its own maturity 
and sufficiency ? 

No one really understands our young people un- 
til he perceives that they regard neither themselves 
nor their elders with any cosmic awe.* They under- 
stand well enough the childish immaturity of what 
some of them are fond of calling ‘“‘the more or less 
human race.” A Church which eliminates humil- 
ity, in the Victorian fashion, from its psychological 
attitude, appears to them a little ridiculous. Paul 
would find them understanding enough were he 
once more to say that, having preached to others, 
he was himself in mortal terror lest he prove in the 

*TIt is young people with some sense of religion, but 
alienated from the Churches, of whom I am here speak- 
ing. That limitation should be remembered. The great 


mass of young people regard themselves with serene com- 
placency. Compare pp. 83-85. 


VICTORIAN ETHICS AND RELIGION 121 


end a castaway, or were he to tell them that he, 
even though an Apostle, so continuously sinned by 
omission and commission as to be a truly pitiable 
man. If the Churches would appeal to them with 
the message that, as one of our own poets has said, 


“Immortality is not a gift; 
Immortality is an achievement; 
And only those who strive mightily 
Shall possess it,” * 


and bid them struggle along a pathway of endeavor, 
failure, contrition, confession, and renewed en- 
deavor; if they would freely admit that there is 
no bishop, pastor, elder, vestryman, or president 
of the Ladies’ Aid who is more than a striving 
child that vaguely glimpses what it means to be- 
come a human being: there would be less irritation 
at what seems humbug and pretense, to stand be- 
tween young people and the spiritual life. If to 
this sort of message were added the frank state- 
ment that much of our current morality is out- 
dated and in no sense essentially Christian; that 
what men do for God and man is more important 
than conventional regulations which they may hap- 
pen to keep; that there are hosts of problems the 
application to which of Christianity the churches 
have only begun to make; that the courage of 


* Edgar Lee Masters, “he Spoon River Anthology, page 
217. 


122 POSTMODERNISM 


youth is needed in the councils of the churches 
that they may make this application: if all these 
things were made clear, young men and women 
might see more easily than now they do that the 
churches can be a help and not a hindrance in the 
development of an honest and vital religion. 


VI. RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 









Wy 
ee) yi 
Wh ta 
Baar 











RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 


T Is a common enough thing nowadays to find 
I it maintained that what we must have is more 
religion. No end of bright and clever people say 
that, by word of mouth and in articles and books. 
It is not always clear exactly what they mean by it. 
A careful study of these numerous utterances leads 
one to the observation that by religion they gen- 
erally mean a spirit of respectable geniality and 
law-abiding humanitarianism. There must be no 
dogma in it, they usually tell us; it must speak as 
one of the scribes and in no wise with authority. 
One draws the impression that there must be no 
ritual in it, either, or very little. It is rather the 
sort of thing which people feel who listen, in an 
atmosphere of respectability, to urgings that we 
should all help one another pursue the good, the 
true, and the beautiful. And we are told that if we 
all drink of this thin and somewhat saccharine 
spiritual beverage, a wonderful thing is going to 
happen. As a result of all this religion we are go- 
ing to save civilization. I should like to devote a 


126 POSTMODERNISM 


few paragraphs to the saying of two things: first, 
that this sort of genial good humor is not religion, 
but quite another thing, of which we have too much 
already and not too little; and second, that the 
purpose of real religion is not to save society, but 
to do something infinitely more worth while. 

A wise and Christian woman who teaches in a 
New England College has described, in words bit- 
ter but searching, this modern thing which mas- 
querades as religion. It is “suave mannered,” she 
says, “pleasant-voiced; endangering nothing in 
particular; an ornament of the Sunday pew; de- 
voted to good causes in proportion to their remote- 
ness, intent upon promoting safe philanthropies 
and foreign missions but, as far as affairs at home 
are concerned, ignorant alike of the ardors of the 
mystic or the heroisms of the reformer; cheerfully 
assuming that whatever is innocently agreeable is 
religious; .. . careless dependence upon an affec- 
tionate God; a domestic religion, calculated to 
make life pleasant in the family circle, and curi- 
ously at ease in Zion.” 

It is a harsh quotation, but not much exagger- 
ated. 

What is wrong with this very modern, humani- 
tarian, non-theological, non-liturgical religion is 
not difficult to see. What makes it banal, what 
makes it to many people, and especially to young 
people, often a bit of a bore, is that its devotees ac- 


RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 127 


tually suppose that man himself is the center of the 
universe. It is more truly anthropomorphic than 
even the most crude savage superstition. Supersti- 
tion tells people to worship a God who is like a 
man. This new conception of religion bids us wor- 
ship man himself. 

It is a faith for people without a sense of hu- 
mor, devoid of imagination. Science has long ago 
upset the notion which our fathers naively had, 
that physically everything, sun, moon, and stars, 
revolves around the earth. At such an idea the 
modern man smiles indulgently. But our fathers 
would have shouted aloud with body-filling laugh- 
ter at the even more ludicrous notion held by the 
modern man that spiritually everything, cherubim, 
seraphim, and God Himself, revolves around the 
human race. The older day knew better. Human 
life is fast-flying and full of uncertainty. Man is 
a child, searching for something of Truth; brave 
and beautiful, it may be, and to be respected, but 
tragic and pathetic, too. His life is a search for 
reality, for a love which cannot be satisfied by 
earthly things, or even by human affection. There 
is a meaning to things somewhere. There is some- 
one who can love and whom to know and to love is 
life. There is a being behind and within and be- 
yond the little that we see and feel. He alone can 
satisfy a man’s hungry heart. He it is who is 
Truth. He is the center of all spiritual reality. To 


128 POSTMODERNISM 


find Him is enough. To have all else and to miss 
Him is to find all else but dust and ashes. The 
search for Him is what life is for. To know God, 
who passes knowledge, that is to find one’s self. All 
the religions of the earth have taught that much. 
From the days when the primitive savage knelt be- 
fore some supposedly sacred tree or some possibly 
holy stone and thrilled at the thought that some- 
where within created matter lay and vibrated a 
force, a power beyond his knowing, into contact 
with which he must somehow come, on through the 
ancient religions into the great faiths of Zoroas- 
trianism, and Brahminism, and Buddhism, and 
Mohammedanism, and Judaism, and Christianity, 
men everywhere have understood that God is all 
that really matters and that religion is the pathway 
by which they humbly and hungrily draw near 
that they may live. It has remained for the modern 
world to conceive of man as in himself constituting 
the sacred center of things and of God as a dear, 
helpful sort of maiden aunt whose chief business is 
to coddle the children. To say that God loves man 
is a wonderful thing in the mouth of the religious 
people of the ages, for it has meant that the crea- 
tive Eternal had compassion upon man, His crea- 
ture. There are a good many people nowadays who 
think it is a gracious act on their part to permit 
the Deity to love them at all. 

In the name of the great mystical souls of the 


RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 129 


past, in the name of the millions of men and 
women who have sought humbly after God if haply 
they might a little find Him, it needs to be said 
that this anthropocentric sentimental benevolence, 
which will have no teaching about the Eternal, no 
theology, but insists that God must be an amor- 
phous influence surrounding and serving human- 
ity; which, in its approaches toward God, has little 
of awe, little of humble adoration, of mystery, and 
solemnity, and reduces worship to the level of a 
pleasant Sunday at the club; is not religion at all, 
but may very easily become mere pride, vain glory, 
and hypocrisy, from which we ought to pray to be 
delivered just as much as from envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness. 

It may possibly be that this sort of lofty humani- 
tarianism is destined to save the world. It seems 
hardly probable., The cult smacks somehow of the 
privileged classes. The great multitude of working 
people do not love humanity. They do not even 
think about humanity. They love their brothers 
and have compassion on one another. It is the man 
who is isolated from his brothers, by accident of 
class or misfortune of occupation, who goes in for 
the higher humanitarianism, loves the human race 
as such and, usually, is fretfully impatient with 
human beings. However this may be, even suppos- 
ing that humanitarianism, perfumed faintly with 
the odor of sanctity, is going to save the world, let 


130 POSTMODERNISM 


us at least be honest enough not to call it religion, 
the high and humble search by man for God, or to 
ask that the Church devote her time and effort to 
its promotion. A great new building in New York, 
we are told, is to be “a house of prayer for all peo- 
ple.” Some have attacked this statement, saying 
that it is not for all people. However that may be, 
it is a house of prayer. It will not stand through 
the ages on the top of its high hill for the auto- 
elevation of humanity by its own genial boot-straps. 
It is to be what every Church ought to be, a house 
of prayer, where men and women shall in deep 
humility and with hungry hearts lift up themselves 
toward Him whom truly to know is the only life 
that matters. As David the King said of the an- 
cient temple, “This palace is not for man, but for 
the Lord God.” If to believe that God is infinitely 
greater than man, and more worth loving, and seek- 
ing, and knowing, be superstition to this age, then 
the Church must continue to be a house of super- 
stition. The ages past and the ages to be have a 
different name for it. That God is all and that man 
has as his chief end to know Him and to enjoy Him 
forever is not superstition. It is religion. No baser 
coin can take its place in the high commerce of 
men. 

It is quite natural that people who think that 
man is the center of the cosmos, and therefore of 
religion, should suppose that the end and aim of 


RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 131 


the Church is to save civilization, to preserve the 
social order. I am told that there are people who 
give wealth to the Church on the supposition that 
it will insure the status quo. I have even been told 
that a few people have given money to build ¢a- 
thedrals with the notion that somehow they will be 
fortresses of social conservatism. It ought to be 
obvious enough that money so given constitutes a 
poor investment. The Church has not been success- 
ful hitherto, or indeed much interested, in preserv- 
ing the status quibus. Nor is it concerned with try- 
ing to overthrow the status quo. Why should it be? 
The Church has seen several kinds of social order 
succeed one another, flower, rot, and die. The Ro- 
man social order was the first one. The Church was 
born into that. It was a militaristic world-empire, 
built on coercion and law. It rotted with selfishness 
and crumbled away. The Church went on. Then 
came the chaotic time of readjustment and out of 
that emerged a feudal social order, at first more 
Christian than that which had been before and 
than any that has come after. It flowered, and it 
withered, and it died. And the Church kept right 
on. Then came a world built on private enterprise 
and trade. It lasted for about two centuries and a 
half and it became impossible and was supplanted, 
leaving behind it curious survivals like Jefferson- 
ian democracy and the idealism of the 1840’s and 
that talk about the abstract freedom of man of 


132 POSTMODERNISM 


which one still hears a bit. That Adam Smith sort 
of social order died, too, about a century ago. But 
the Church kept on. Our present civilization is 
based upon capitalistic control of the stores of the 
earth and of the power driven tool. It is develop- 
ing at great speed, growing out of hand, pushing 
the mobs into the cavernous cities, taking from the 
individual the joy of craftsmanship, penalizing 
family life, and generally running amuck. It 
creaks and groans in labor disputes, smirks in di- 
vorce and mis-directed sex, and occasionally 
crashes in world war. The Church of the living 
God did not make it. Men made it. Whether it can 
be tamed by its creators no one can be quite sure. 
It may prove a Frankenstein monster which turns 
to rend its makers. At any rate, everyone admits 
that the present social order is a bit shaky. The 
Church does not care whether it survives or not. 
If it perishes, the Church will go right on, religion 
will go right on. God sitteth between the Cherubim, 
be the earth never so unquiet. The great ecclesia 
will stand on its heights long after capitalism has 
gone to join feudalism, and imperialism, and Bol- 
shevism, and has been supplanted by some other 
interesting notion or other in the way of social 
order. 

But, perhaps it may be asked, has the Church 
no social message at all? To be sure it has. Through 
the ages God has revealed with ever increasing 


RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 133 


clearness that only those who love their fellow hu- 
man beings can approach the glowing heart of God. 
“Tf a man love not his brother, whom he hath seen, 
how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” The 
prophet of old said that one must do justice and 
love mercy before he can walk humbly with his 
God; and that to do those three things is the whole 
duty of man. And Jesus Christ says that we shall 
love God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, 
and mind, with all our power of loving, and that 
this will involve loving our neighbor as ourselves. 
You must love God and be loved of Him to have 
life mean anything, says the Church, and the ex- 
perience of the ages gives agreement, and in order 
to be acceptable with and by God, you must love 
men and women and little children. 

‘That was ever the message of Jesus, who by His 
Incarnation has made God comprehensible and 
lovable. You can search His sayings through and 
find no command to be humanitarian. You will 
find no urging that we should seek the good, and 
the true, and the beautiful. You will find awe, and 
reverence, and humility, both practiced and pre- 
scribed toward the Eternal, and charity, and hu- 
man kindness, and sacrifice, and true affection, 
both prescribed and practiced toward men. You 
will search and search in vain for any pleas for the 
necessity of preserving civilization, that of His 
earthly day or that of any other day. To Hin, if 


134 POSTMODERNISM 


men would act humanly toward other men and 
would humbly and reverently seek God, civiliza- 
tion would take care of itself. He knew that as 
long as any civilization made those two things easy 
and natural it would live and that when it ceased 
to make them possible it would perish. That was 
all there was to that. 

If our civilization continues to develop along 
lines of the sacred rights of property instead of on 
lines of the sacred rights of men, if control of 
wealth is given to people who do not love, if men 
are to be divided into masters and servants, capi- 
talists and laborers, instead of united as brothers 
and friends, it will not be long before capitalism is 
as dead as the dodo bird and a captain of industry 
will be as curious an antiquarian figure as a feudal 
knight in armor. It will not be the Church which 
overthrows. It will simply be another case of men 
who have defied the Lord and built a city on an- 
other than the Lord’s commanded bases. And as 
for preserving, as for keeping the ins in just be- 
cause they are in, that surely is too much to ask. 
If civilization is decent it will not need the Church 
artificially to buttress it. If it is not decent it would 
be blasphemy for the Church to seek to preserve it. 

We must not confound human destiny and con- 
temporary civilization, with its ins and its outs, 
and its classes, and its settled order of things. 
Otherwise we may be in the foolish position of the 


RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION 135 


imaginary Bishop in one of Mr. Sitwell’s poems, 
who fell asleep in his garden one warm afternoon. 
While he slept there came the Judgment Day. The 
Bishop woke to find the second housemaid going by 
in a robe of glorious iridescent silk with a crown 
of glory on her head. ‘‘I warned people,” said the 
Bishop, “that the first thing we knew we’d have 
Bolshevism.” 

Let us by all means have more religion, but let 
it be real religion, theocentric, awed, a thing of 
beauty, and of deep humility. And let us not seek 
it for the sake of preserving civilization, that rela- 
tively unimportant incident. Let us seek it because 
we have lost our way, in a maze of sin and pride; 
because we are lonely, and life is dull, and the 
world’s gaudy baubles seem like tinsel; because 
God is our lost treasure; because we would be 
shriven; because we are children and the Father’s 
house is home; because we have too long been 
clever and self-sufficient; because worldliness is 
drab and stupid; because we would eat again the 
bread of God and drink once more the purple wine 
of Heaven. 


PRINTED IN 
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
BY 
MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE, WIS. 


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